Disease and its metaphors in contemporary Polish female poetry

Abstract

The article deals with metaphors of disease in selected contemporary Polish female poets. In focus are the portrayals of disease, its symptoms and consequences for the imperfect human body. The anthropological perspective assumed in this study, which reveals the coding of human experience in a literary work, emphasises the connections between the poetics of the work and the problem of defining individual identity. The analysis leads to the following conclusions: the poets (both in lyrical poetry and other intimist writing) usually relate to conceptual metaphors motivated by the notions of object and containment (e.g. life is a container, body is an object, body is a container); other recognizable metaphors are orientational (wpaść w wilczy dół ‘fall into the pitfall’) or grounded in the notion of fire (czuję się spalona ‘I feel consumed by flames’). By modifying classic metaphors, the poets construct new cognitive perspectives. They express the feeling of isolation from the world of the healthy and the fragility of the human body as a material “prison house”. They also make attempts to regain control over it by extending the boundaries of intimacy. By studying the esthetic and epistemological aspects of metaphors in connection with an understanding of self in a situation of irreversible loss of full physical control, of fear and of bold expansion of one’s corporality, it is possible to identify individual and cultural grounding of corporality.