In Camp’s essay “Metaphor and That Certain ‘Je Ne Sais Quoi'” she breaks down why Juliet is the sun brings up a kaleidoscope of emotions and stays in the collective Poetry memory. I specifically love that Camp thinks through why this open-ended, some might even call it vague, metaphor actually works differently than we usually assume.

Often in teaching poetry, or being taught it, it’s easy to say “make the metaphor more precise or, just make it stranger”. Truthfully, we are all in fear of cliché, and T.S. Eliot has scared us into staying clear from abstraction… Yet Camp argues that the open-endedness is closer to what she elsewhere calls a frame: the metaphor asks you to see Juliet through the sun, importing a whole perspective, an organizing lens rather than swapping in a checklist of shared attributes.

What I find most useful is her point that any literal paraphrase inevitably turns the metaphor into a list: beautiful, hot, life-giving, natural, central, orbital, and a list is closed the moment you finish writing it, while a lens keeps generating new observations the longer you look through it.

That’s is probably the sharpest argument against “precision” as the goal: precision is a property of propositions, not of ways of seeing!

She also talks about metaphor’s twofold quality, meaning, you’re suppose to hold Juliet is like the sun and Juliet is not the sun at once. I think that unresolved doubleness might be where real strangeness comes from, rather than from just picking a more surprising vehicle. And she notes the frame doesn’t let you cherry-pick the flattering parts, there is a darkness inside the frame, invoking the sun also drags in the danger of staring too long, whether or not Romeo meant to say that. Once you invoke a frame, it has a mind of its own!