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The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition
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 what makes a poem "work" and endure.
The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and 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.
The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and 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.
228 pages, Hardcover
Published March 25, 2020
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April 23, 2021
Whilst I only read a single chapter of this book (Chapter 4 - metaphors) I gained a huge amount of useful information about the way that metaphor can be conceived of as a process rather than a product. One of the difficulties in focusing on metaphor as a product, as Freeman says, is that you have to consider whether it is more figurative or literal, more of a “testable model of reality” or a poetic device. When you see it as a process, on the other hand, with a hierarchy of subliminal, conceptual and linguistic elements then you can ‘move’ up and down the hierarchy to assess the metaphors more freely and the poem overall.
She shows diagrams the three levels as a ‘tree’ with the leaves representing the individual linguistic expressions, the branches and trunk being the core concepts and the hidden roots are the sensory-motor-emotional inputs that motivate metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson’s Cognitive Metaphor Theory (UP IS GOOD, TALL IS STRONG, etc) are the branches that come out of early unarticulated experiences with our tall, strong, parents. The idea that LOVE IS A JOURNEY for example could be seen to lead to the ‘leaves’ of ‘our relationship is going nowhere’ or ‘we’re travelling nicely’, and could have potentially been derived from some early pre-conscious experience, such as being carried around by our doting parents, encouraging us to see their loving embrace as a love in motion.
As an aside, her tree diagram is somewhat similar to the idea of Freud’s Iceberg metaphor in which the top is the conscious mind, the middle is pre-conscious, and the bottom is sub-conscious. Likewise, the linguistic leaves are what we say and draw and write with, the branches are our obvious, explicable motivations, whilst any deeper, darker, less definable motivations remain hidden, even perhaps to ourselves. Whilst it is apparently debateable whether Freud actually coined the iceberg metaphor, he did also have a house one in which our mind works like the public-private aspect of our homes, moving from a public persona to a more private one, which is similar but different to both the tree and the iceberg.
In the early part of the chapter Freeman relies heavily on lengthy quotes from other writers, and whilst this helps to buttress her arguments, it means that those arguments and her own ideas, risk getting lost in a collage of literary extracts. By the end of the chapter however, the ideas appear as predominantly her own with only occasional side references for support.
My favourite section of the chapter was the analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Metaphors’ in which Plath presents a riddle in nine lines, each with nine syllables, and nine core metaphors. I highly recommend looking up the poem, and Freeman’s explanation if you are stuck.
Only a partial read for me, but highly illuminating.
She shows diagrams the three levels as a ‘tree’ with the leaves representing the individual linguistic expressions, the branches and trunk being the core concepts and the hidden roots are the sensory-motor-emotional inputs that motivate metaphors. Lakoff and Johnson’s Cognitive Metaphor Theory (UP IS GOOD, TALL IS STRONG, etc) are the branches that come out of early unarticulated experiences with our tall, strong, parents. The idea that LOVE IS A JOURNEY for example could be seen to lead to the ‘leaves’ of ‘our relationship is going nowhere’ or ‘we’re travelling nicely’, and could have potentially been derived from some early pre-conscious experience, such as being carried around by our doting parents, encouraging us to see their loving embrace as a love in motion.
As an aside, her tree diagram is somewhat similar to the idea of Freud’s Iceberg metaphor in which the top is the conscious mind, the middle is pre-conscious, and the bottom is sub-conscious. Likewise, the linguistic leaves are what we say and draw and write with, the branches are our obvious, explicable motivations, whilst any deeper, darker, less definable motivations remain hidden, even perhaps to ourselves. Whilst it is apparently debateable whether Freud actually coined the iceberg metaphor, he did also have a house one in which our mind works like the public-private aspect of our homes, moving from a public persona to a more private one, which is similar but different to both the tree and the iceberg.
In the early part of the chapter Freeman relies heavily on lengthy quotes from other writers, and whilst this helps to buttress her arguments, it means that those arguments and her own ideas, risk getting lost in a collage of literary extracts. By the end of the chapter however, the ideas appear as predominantly her own with only occasional side references for support.
My favourite section of the chapter was the analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Metaphors’ in which Plath presents a riddle in nine lines, each with nine syllables, and nine core metaphors. I highly recommend looking up the poem, and Freeman’s explanation if you are stuck.
Only a partial read for me, but highly illuminating.
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