Editing Extended metaphor (section)

== History of meaning==
In the [[Renaissance]], the term ''conceit'' (which is related to the word [[concept]]) indicated the idea that informed a literary work—its theme. Later, it came to stand for the extended and heightened metaphor common in Renaissance poetry, and later still it came to denote the even more elaborate metaphors of 17th century poetry. 

The Renaissance conceit, given its importance in [[Petrarch]]'s ''[[Il Canzoniere]]'', is also referred to as Petrarchan conceit. It is a comparison in which human experiences are described in terms of an outsized metaphor (a kind of metaphorical [[hyperbole]])—as in Petrarch's comparison between the effect of the gaze of the beloved and the sun melting snow. The history of poetry often features contemporary poets referencing the verses of their predecessors, like [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]] building on Petrarchan imagery in his [[Sonnet 130]]: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun".<ref name=princeton/>

The 17th-century and the sometimes so-called [[metaphysical poets]] extended the notion of the elaborate metaphor; their idea of conceit differs from an extended analogy in the sense that it does not have a clear-cut relationship between the things being compared.<ref name=princeton>{{cite book|first=C. |last=Johnson |editor1-first=Stephen |editor1-last=Cushman |editor2-first=Clare |editor2-last=Cavanagh|editor3-first=Jahan |editor3-last=Ramazani|editor4-first=Paul |editor4-last=Rouzer |title=The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uKiC6IeFR2UC&pg=PA290|date=2012|publisher=[[Princeton University Press]]|isbn=978-1-4008-4142-4|pages=289-91 |chapter=Conceit}}</ref> [[Helen Gardner (critic)|Helen Gardner]], in her study of the metaphysical poets, observed that "a conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness" and that "a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness."<ref name=gardner/>