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Article: Mapping the mind and the body: on W.H. Auden's personifications.(Critical Essay)
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- September 22, 2002
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Northern Illinois University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"The will of one by being two At every moment is denied."
(W. H. Auden, "The Sea and The Mirror," Collected 413)
1. Introduction: Mind, Body, and Personification
Despite our traditional view of the body and mind as divided, one figurative way for representing the two in our thought and in our language is the unified method of metaphor. For example, because we have easier access to bodies than to minds, our everyday notion of body language means we "map" from the body to the mind to interpret the behavior of others. As Simon Baron-Cohen has argued, this normal psychological mapping provides us with a "theory of mind" that some autistic children ...