Metaphor in The Cancer Poetry Project

In this paper I discuss the relation between metaphor and its role in the poetry written by cancer patients and their caregivers as reflected in the two volumes of The Cancer Poetry Project, edited by Karen Miller. I suggest that metaphor may be less important than is assumed by either Susan Sontag and other critical philosophers, Lakoff and Johnson and other cognitive linguists, or Elena Semino and similar cognitive stylistic and poetic approaches. Metaphor is there, and when we focus on it, it has a lot of potential power, both in negative and in positive ways. But the use of metaphor seems to be relatively subsidiary to the more encompassing genre event of writing a cancer poem for a range of different purposes in the experience of cancer. I conclude that metaphor scholars who wish to apply the study of metaphor in medical practice need to pay more attention to these encompassing discourse factors than happens today.