Mastering Metaphors: A Possible Path to Understand Modern Poetry

Understanding modern poetry is a big problem for average readers because of all kinds of rhetorical devices filled with them, especially metaphors, which are hard for the readers to understand clearly. Thus, grasping metaphors would provide a possible solution to enhance the understanding of modern poetry. Based on the motivation to better understand modern poetry, the paper explores the 11 mechanisms of metaphors in modern poetry with examples in detail, i.e., blending, mapping, frame shifting, image schema, conceptual integration, contextual grounding, inter-subjectivity, embodied cognition, recursiveness, juxtaposition, shape-moulding, by borrowing some concepts from Cognitive Linguistics, literary studies, and Rhetorics, which can be adopted as means and methods to understand modern poems.