This post is a scholium for Joyce Carol Oates, who has
written a very readable essay in the current New York
Review of Books titled
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature.
Oates mentions three times, without attributing it to the late poet
Wallace Stevens, the phrase "the motive for metaphor."
The following paragraphs are by Denis Donoghue, from
a piece titled "The Motive for Metaphor" in the Winter 2013
issue of The Hudson Review —
Related material in this journal: Copleston and a fellow Jesuit.