The Study of the Effect of Gender on the Use of Simile and Metaphor in the Poetry of Contemporary Women Poets

Many researchers in the field of socio-linguistics, sociology and feminism have done research on the principle of language showing that there are some differences between the language of men and women. The question is that whether gender plays any role in literary language(poetry) and besides phonetic, lexical and syntactic levels of language ifimages, such as simile and metaphor, are gender-oriented and are influenced by the mentality of women poets.In this researchthe influence of gender on the use of simile and metaphor in the poetry of ten contemporary Iranian women poets have been studied. First, one or two collections of the poetry of these poets have been randomly chosen, and secondthe two main figures of simile and metaphor have been analyzed in respect of gender. It is concluded that due to differences between men and women, such as their social and biological background, women poets use gender-oriented similes and metaphors. Moreover, they use these types of similes and metaphors to express their romantic and sensual-emotional tendencies.