The Poem as Icon

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.

Margaret H. Freeman is Professor Emerita, Los Angeles Valley College; past president of the Emily Dickinson International Society (1988-1992); co-director of Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts (myrifield.org); and co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Cognition and Poetics. Her research interests include aesthetics, cognitive poetics, linguistics, literature, and philosophy.

Preface
Chapter 1 Poetic Cognition1. Iconicity and the Being of Reality2. Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Cognition3. The Sentience of Cognition4. Developing a Multidisciplinary Terminology5. Outline of Chapters
Chapter 2 Icon1. What Is an Icon?1.1 The semiotic icon1.2 The religious icon1.3 The linguistic icon1.4 The popular icon2. The Slippery Slopes of Meaning2.1 Reification as cognitive economy2.2 The form-content dichotomy3. Iconicity in the Arts4. Iconicity in Literary Criticism
Chapter 3 Semblance1. Beyond Mimesis2. Manifestation 3. The In-visibility of Being4. The Ontology of Poetic Perception as Iconic of Reality4.1 Prosodic structure4.2 Prepositional use4.3 Concealed images4.4 Sound patterning
Chapter 4 Metaphor1. Metaphor as Actual World Formation2. Metaphor as Possible World Formation3. Metaphor in the Literary Arts4. The Semeosis of Poetic Metaphor5. Metaphoring as Cognitive Processing6. The Hierarchy of Cognitive Metaphoring7. The Ontology of Poetic Metaphor8. The Role of Metaphor in Poetic Iconicity
Chapter 5 Schema1. Probing Sensate Cognition2. Schema as Correlation Between Self and World3. Schema as Constraint on Experience4. The Role of Schema in Imagination and Language5. Schema as Internalizing Sensate Structure in Poetry6. PATH and VERTICALITY Schemata in Li Bai's Shudaoan7. The Poetic Use of Schema8. Schema as Defining a Poetics
Chapter 6 Affect1. The Synaesthetics of Affect2. Sonic and Structural Prosodies3. The Import of Affect4. Schema Theory and the Structure of Affects5. The Force Dynamics of Affective Schemata5.1 The level of hearer/reader - poem5.2 The level of physical - force elements5.3 The level of sound - sight5.4 The level of internal sensibility - external stimuli5.5 The level of interior memory - interior emotion6. Emotive - Conceptual Schemata
Chapter 7 The Poem as Icon1. A Case Study of Two Poems1.1 Prosodic details in Smith's sonnet1.2 Prosodic details in Shelley's sonnet2. The Workings of Poetic Iconicity2.1 The trap of the gap2.2 Closing the gap3. The Poetic Icon3.1 I Seventy Years Later3.2 II The Poem as Icon3.3 III Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn4. The Transformative Power of the Icon
Chapter 8 Aesthetic Cognition1. The Aesthetic Faculty2. Aesthetic Function3. Aesthetic Iconicity in the Arts4. Aesthetic Evaluation5. Iconic Aesthetics in "Dover Beach"
Afterword1. Poetry in Context2. Eve's Dilemma3. A Theory of Everything?4. Poetry as an Icon of the Being of Reality
GlossaryReferencesIndex