Ut Pictura Poesis? The Poetics of Verbal Imagery

How can verbal-cued poetry be “visual,” “pictorial,” and “vivid”? This chapter aims at looking behind such notions by isolating the basic semiotic mechanisms of vision, picture-viewing, and mental imagery and provides a descriptive model to investigate (1) the semiotic dimension of verbal imagery with respect to its visual and pictorial character and (2) its relationship to the reader’s experience of mental imagery. Through exemplary analyses of visual poetry, onomatopoeia, figurative language, the historical present, and ekphrastic descriptions, it is shown that the literary core concepts of “visuality,” “pictoriality,” and “vividness” refer to surface phenomena that are not directly linked to the phenomenal experience of visual perception and image likeness. The results are discussed against the background of recent neurocognitive studies, leading to the conclusion that such notions should be given up in favor of a general model of representation in terms of poetic iconicity.