Poetics: Vehicle Reconstruction——From Plato to Wordsworth

Poetics,from Plato to Wordsworth,has undergone more than 2000 years' reconstruction.During this course,writings on What is poetry never ceased.Much as Plato put forward his of mimesis from ontology or Wordsworth his spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from expressionism,their answers to the question of what is poetry show that they were thinking in metaphor and opting for vehicles.This paper points out that behind the pyramid of volumes on poetics lies metaphorical thinking.