“Vliegtuigen zijn vogels”. Willekeur in de metaforen van twee generaties Vlaamse experimentelen

In this article, the first question is whether the way in which an effect of arbitrariness in metaphors is created in Flemish experimental poetry shows similarities to the way in which this impression was created in surrealist poetry. Secondly, we hypothesize that the arbitrariness in the metaphors of the second generation of experimental poets increases or decreases compared to the metaphors of the first generation. The poetry of the French surrealist Paul Éluard functions as our point of reference. We found that the arbitrariness in the metaphors of a few of Hugo Claus’s poems is relative – something we also observed in Éluard’s poems – because of the presence of conceptual metaphors, of one-shot metaphors in which it is not impossible to read continuity between the source and target domains, and of connections between the metaphors. The arbitrariness in Dirk Christiaens’s poems seems to be even weaker. He uses creative realisations of conceptual metaphors, and relies less heavily on one-shot metaphors.