The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition (Cognition and Poetics)

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. "Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment."-- Provided by publisher The Poem as Icon resolves long-standing questions of poetic function from a cognitive perspective. Margaret Freeman shows how poetry, as one expression of the aesthetic faculty, enables us to iconically access and experience the "being" of reality. Title_Pages Preface Acknowledgments Poetic_Cognition Icon Semblance Metaphor Affect The_Poem_as_Icon Aesthetic_Cognition Afterword Glossary References Index