Afterword
Throughout this book, I have attempted to take up Archibald MacLeish’s challenge to show how poets can carry the world in all its complexities into the human mind, in enclosing boundless space in a square foot of paper, and in how deluge can pour from the inch space of the heart. By exploring the workings of the cognitive sciences in approaches to poetry and reevaluating the nature of aesthetics as basic to both the sciences and the arts, I hope to have shown how a poem may create an icon of felt reality. Answers to MacLeish’s questions lie in recognition of a world that, in its never-ending changes and transformations, provides ever new horizons for seekers of knowledge and wisdom. Art in all its forms takes a necessary place along with the sciences in the human expressions of aesthetic cognition by iconically understanding the being of an infinitely changing reality.