Conceit

Conceit
Aside from its common usage, signifying "excessive pride" (i.e. the 'conceit,' the excessive pride
experienced as a result of having an intellect vastly superior to the rest of the class), in literary
terms, a conceit[1] is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or
poetic passage. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a
conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.
Extended conceits in English are part of the poetic idiom of Mannerism, during the later sixteenth
and early seventeenth century.
Metaphysical conceit:
The term is generally associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets in contemporary usage.
In the metaphysical conceit, metaphors have a much more purely conceptual, and thus tenuous,
relationship between the things being compared. Helen Gardner[2] observed that "a conceit is a
comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness" and that "a comparison becomes a
conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness." An
example of the latter would be George Herbert's "Praise (3)," in which the generosity of God is
compared to a bottle which ("As we have boxes for the poor") will take in an infinite amount of the
speaker's tears.
An often-cited example of the metaphysical conceit is the metaphor from John Donne's "The Flea,"
in which a flea that bites both the speaker and his lover becomes a conceit arguing that his lover
has no reason to deny him sexually, although they are not married:
Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.
When Sir Philip Sidney begins a sonnet with the conventional idiomatic expression "My true-love
hath my heart and I have his", but then takes the metaphor literally and teases out a number of
literal possibilities and extravagantly playful conceptions in the exchange of hearts, the result is a
fully-formed conceit.
Petrarchan conceit:
The Petrarchan conceit, used in love poetry, exploits a particular set of images for comparisons
with the despairing lover and his unpitying but idolized mistress. For instance, the lover is a ship
on a stormy sea, and his mistress "a cloud of dark disdain"; or else the lady is a sun whose beauty
and virtue shine on her lover from a distance.
The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using oxymoron, for instance
uniting peace and war, burning and freezing, and so forth. But images which were novel in the
sonnets of Petrarch became clichés in the poetry of later imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed
Petrarchan conceits when describing his love for Rosaline as "bright smoke, cold fire, sick health".
History of the term:
In the Renaissance, the term (which is related to the word concept) indicated any particularly
fanciful expression of wit, and was later used pejoratively of outlandish poetic metaphors.
Recent literary critics have used the term to mean simply the style of extended and heightened
metaphor common in the Renaissance and particularly in the 17th century, without any particular
indication of value. Within this critical sense, the Princeton Encyclopedia makes a distinction
between two kinds of conceits: the Metaphysical conceit, described above, and the Petrarchan
conceit. In the latter, human experiences are described in terms of an outsized metaphor (a kind of
metaphorical hyperbole), like the stock comparison of eyes to the sun, which Shakespeare makes
light of in his sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."
Other uses:
For later literature and film, the term is sometimes used to refer to a device that stretches reality to
take advantage of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." This
usage is seldom seen in formal literary criticism.
An example from popular culture is the way many cartoons feature animals that can speak to each
other, and in many cases can understand human speech, but humans cannot understand the
speech of animals. This conceit is seen, and sometimes exploited for plot purposes, in such films
as Over The Hedge, the Balto series, and Brother Bear.

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