The Poem as Icon

Abstract The objective in this book is to show how poetry enables us cognitively to aesthetically access, experience, and identify with the visible and invisible “being” of reality, with art as one cognitive expression of the aesthetic faculty, science another. Just as scientific knowledge of reality is achieved through physically exploring the far reaches of the visible and invisible worlds, so is poetic experience achieved through iconically simulating in semblance the “being” of reality that integrates both self and world in participatory unity. “Being” here should not be understood as the existence of material substance, but as the essence of all that is, both visible and invisible, material and immaterial, a life force in continuous flux and change. The book explores cognition as the sensory-motor-emotive-conceptual processes of “minding” and the aesthetic faculty as the processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment that underlie all human cognition, including the arts and the sciences. Drawing from research such as blending and neurocognition in interdisciplinary cognitive literary studies, the book attempts to resolve long-standing questions about the function of poetry. Accepting the premise that poetry is its own artistic reason for being, it introduces the major elements—semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect—that constitute a poem as icon in motivating a poet’s intension and a respondent’s engagement. In so doing the book makes the case that a poem is a potential icon of the felt reality of being and shows that poetic iconicity provides a means for evaluating great poetry and an explanation for its endurance.