As its name implies, the palimtext retains vestiges of prior inscriptions out of which it emerges. Or, more accurately, it is the still-visible record of its responses to those earlier writings. The poet strives to reduce words to their barest signification, prioer to their subordination to cognitive or rhetorical schemes. Rather than add new llines on fresh sheets of paper, he would build his poem on top of itself, adding new lines, in many cases ten or twelve pages thick. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Poems stand on their own.
Thus, there is nothing metaphoric about reason, neither its operations nor the concepts it operates on. Here we find a power of metaphor we have not previously discussed, the Power of Revelation .