This article tries to deal with chess-related expressions and metaphors and their complexities in the poetry of the renowned the twelfth-century Azerbaijani-style poet Khāqāni and the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley. Based on such concepts as T. S. Eliot’s ‘unification of sensibility’ ...
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This article tries to deal with chess-related expressions and metaphors and their complexities in the poetry of the renowned the twelfth-century Azerbaijani-style poet Khāqāni and the seventeenth-century Metaphysical poet Abraham Cowley. Based on such concepts as T. S. Eliot’s ‘unification of sensibility’ and ‘objective correlative’ and a comparative conceptual analysis of the Azerbaijani-style and metaphysical poetry in their historical context, it is shown that the two poets, though far removed in time, enjoyed the same intellectual and poetical strategies in presenting their ideas and would employ abstruse chess conceits in an attempt to act upon what the eighteenth-century English critic Samuel Johnson depreciatively calls ‘the most heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together’ and what the modernist poet T. S. Eliot would appreciate as 'a fusion of thought and feeling'. The result is a kind of poetry in both poets which is intellectually challenging and emotionally engaging.