How to Build a Metaphor: Novel Metaphors Construed by Concrete Elements in Tomas Tranströmer's Poetry

In the first linguistic study on Nobel laureate Tomas Transtromer’s poetry, a hypothesis generated from earlier research in literature was tested on poems where Transtromer makes use of concreteness to a high degree. In addition, a comparison corpus was created, consisting of poems by authors who share important common traits with Transtromer. The results did not support the hypothesis, as the comparison corpus also showed a high degree of concreteness. However, in contrast to the comparison corpus, Transtromer’s poems exhibit no verbal processes among their verbs, which contribute to a heavier expression. Moreover, when investigating the metaphors, an unparalleled quality was revealed. The majority of Transtromer’s novel metaphors are constructed solely by concrete elements. In contrast to the claim that concreteness in metaphors explains the world (Lakoff and Johnson), Transtromer seems to show, through many of his metaphors, how wondrous the world is, thereby creating ostranenie “defamiliarization” (Shklovsky).