Evincing the soul of a city

ABSTRACT

Background: This article outlines how poetry is able to configure the soul of a cityscape through the modes of personification and metaphors of public space.

Purpose: It argues that these modes are so intertwined in reality that it is possible to gather a sense of a city’s soul through experiential, rhythmical, temporal and transmigratory images of cityscape.

Design: The article applies a typology of metaphors and personification as the basis for the analysis of the soul’s presence in a city

Main argument and findings: The results of the study show that named and unnamed literal, figurative and personified terms help evince the transmigration of the city’s soul.

Originality and value: An implication arising from this finding is that figurative language offers considerable transfers of meaning from one epistemic element to another to enable a nuanced understanding of cityscapes. There appears an unassailable case for the union of cities and poetry as part of our scholarly studies on spiritual literacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Soul
• poetry
• city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alistair Brown

Alistair Brown ORCID 0000-0002-4529-9099 works at the School of Accounting, Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Western Australia. He has recently published on the regional areas of Melanesia and Kenya, and takes an interest in educational research.