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.

Affect

Schemata acquire affective value through force dynamics at the deepest level of cognition. Affect is a transitive activity between the self as agonist and an “other” as antagonist that arises from sensory, motor, or emotive factors. In poetry, affect results primarily from a poem’s sonic and structural prosody to create the impression or “illusion” of virtual life. The affect respondents feel isn’t something static “in” the poem but a dynamic response to the poet’s intensions and motivations. Missing a poem’s affective tone can lead to misreading its emotive import and misevaluating the poet’s intension, as the discussion shows in a poem by Thomas Hardy. It also shows how the force dynamics of the FEAR schema in a Wallace Stevens poem creates an icon of danger confronting the self’s homeostasis. The chapter ends by summarizing the aspects of affective schemata that can lead to a theory of a model of affect in poetry and life.

Metaphor

Metaphor is dangerous. The act of metaphoring—mapping between unlike domains—has iconic power, power to transform our conventional ways of seeing and, by so doing, to change or modulate our minds and our behavior. First, the chapter lays the groundwork for a cognitively oriented view of metaphor by discussing two contrasting views of what happens when one either takes metaphor literally or sees it as a model of reality. It then explores the ways in which good metaphor has been traditionally understood in literary criticism in order to suggest a more interconnected approach between ourselves and the worlds of our experience. The chapter compares the present view of metaphorical function in structuring a poem as icon with two Peircean-influenced approaches, and introduces hierarchic metaphoric processing at the linguistic, conceptual, and sensory-emotive levels. Finally, the chapter builds on the model of blending to explain how metaphoring functions in the creation of a poetic icon.

Semblance

An icon always stands for something beyond itself. This chapter explores the various assumptions made by thinking of that relation in such terms as likeness, similarity, and representation that do not capture the nature of a poem as icon. Therefore the term semblance as “simulation” is chosen to avoid misconceptions that result in the separation of self from world. Semblance is the ontological underpinning of iconicity that relates it to the “felt life” of our epistemic reality. From a phenomenological perspective, the “being” of reality is in-visible, hidden within the precategorial realms of our preconscious sensory, motor, and emotive processes. The essence of being does not reside in a unified sense of one entity but in life in all its various manifestations. The ways in which poems create semblance are manifold and varied, as indicated in discussions of poems by Brendan Galvin, W. S. Merwin, and Wallace Stevens.

Aesthetic Cognition

This chapter places poetic iconicity within the broader context of aesthetics. The history of aesthetics has developed several diverse meanings over time and in different disciplines. The chapter therefore redefines the aesthetic faculty as basic to both the sciences and the arts. It involves purpose, intension, function, and value that leads to empathy and ethical judgment of human behavior and activity. Earlier chapters approached poetic iconicity mainly from the perspective of the poet’s motivations and intensions. This chapter shows how poetic iconicity can establish one means by which poetry can be aesthetically read and evaluated. After introducing what appear to be misreadings of a Matthew Arnold poem that do not take into account Arnold’s aesthetic principles as evidenced in it, the chapter shows that his poem “Dover Beach” is a meditation on the aesthetic faculty in creating a poem as an icon of the felt being of reality.

The Poem as Icon

Not all poetry achieves the status of becoming an icon, nor is it necessarily a poet’s intent. Inevitably, however, the question arises as to whether such iconicity indicates one way of evaluating poetry that lasts. In a case study of two poems on the same theme, I show how only one becomes an icon in my sense of the term. I then revisit the question of iconic motivation by briefly exploring our human propensity for finding aesthetic coherence between ourselves and the external world through our cognitive faculties of imagination and reason. Wallace Stevens’s poetics constitutes a revelation of his theory that the aim of poetry is to enact an iconic semblance of the felt but hidden reality of being, exemplified throughout his poetic corpus and culminating in his poem “The Rock.” The chapter concludes with a brief example of the transformative power of the icon for both poet and respondent.

Schema

The self is more than we consciously know. Neural and bodily processes of sensory experience, motor function, and emotive forces bind together to create the unity that is both the preconscious and conscious self. These sensate elements are governed by embodied schemata, a level of organization that binds subliminal sensory-motor-emotive processes with conceptual awareness in correlation with the worlds of our experience. Schemata internally structure metaphor by isomorphically creating correlations between its domains. The chapter first discusses the difference between the role of schemata that operate in everyday activities and behaviors and their role in the poetic arts. It shows how schemata bind the sensate elements of cognitive metaphoring in creating a poem as icon by revisiting Sylvia Plath’s poem discussed in the previous chapter, and two further poems by Li Bai and Elizabeth Bishop. The chapter ends by showing how schemata define the different poetics of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.

Icon

Icons mean different things to different people. This chapter describes how the term icon is understood in semiotics, linguistics, religion, and popular discourse in order to establish a working definition for understanding how a poem can become an icon. Iconicity is the means whereby poetic features contribute to achieving a poem’s status as an icon. The chapter then takes up two problematic issues in the question of “meaning.” Making objects (nouns) out of actions (verbs) obscures the processes of minding that underlie aesthetic activity. Likewise, separating form from content obscures the integrated relation between “ceptions” (conceptions, perceptions, and proprioceptions) and structures. By replacing these assumptions from a cognitive science approach, the chapter prepares the groundwork for understanding the role of iconicity in the arts. After giving some examples of iconicity in literary critical approaches to poetry, it ends with a brief summary of the main features that constitute poetic iconicity.

Poetic Cognition

This introduction prepares the groundwork for explaining how a poem may become an icon. Drawing from insights in cognitive science, it discusses the nature of sensate cognition and introduces a theory of aesthetic cognition that places poetic cognition as a subcategory within its interdisciplinary field. The chapter begins with the central question of poetic cognition: how poetry achieves the felt experience of the essential being of reality that poets and writers throughout the centuries have claimed for their art. “Being” is understood as both the “life force” of organic systems and the “essence” of what makes a rock a rock. In this sense, particular creations of human cognitive activity may become icons of the being of reality. As a preliminary, the chapter briefly discusses the nature of the cognitive self, the roles of science and aesthetics, and the need to establish appropriate terminology for the interdisciplinary fields concerned in an aesthetics of cognition.