Poet laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith. Credit: Shawn Miller/flickr/CC BY 2.0 Read excerpts of Tracy K. Smith’s poems, “My God, It’s Full of Stars” and “Watershed.” Read excerpts of Rafael ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

Like similes, metaphors are a form of comparison. While similes use “as” or “like” to make comparisons, a metaphor is when you say that something is something else. She’s a night owl. The bus driver ...

Historically, metaphors and figurative language have been ignored as a serious topic of study in psychology and philosophy, exiled to the land of rhetoricians or literary analysts. In fact, even in ...

Aristotle concluded in the 4th century BC that “the difference is but slight” between similes and metaphors. After all, the metaphor “he’s a bear in the morning,” means the same as the simile “he’s ...

Poetry and social media join forces in April, as Tell Me More celebrates National Poetry Month with the Muses and Metaphor series. We'll feature poems exchanged via Twitter by NPR fans — always in 140 ...

To understand what St. Paul was saying in his letters, we also need to appreciate how and why he was saying it. Paul’s letters, which are the earliest complete documents preserved in the New Testament ...