The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition by Margaret H. Freeman (review)

Reviewed by: The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition by Margaret H. Freeman Rick Joines The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition. By Margaret H. Freeman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Borrowing her title from Wallace Stevens’s “The Rock,” Margaret H. Freeman gives us a fascinating exploration of how poetry “enables us to cognitively access and experience the ‘being’ of reality, all that is and is not, both seen and unseen” (1). Freeman develops the case that the poem as icon is an activity or function more than it is an object or artifact. Poetic iconicity is what a poem does as it maps ways to free ourselves from abstractions and concepts structuring our usual rationality. Freeman contends the iconic poem is an affective response to reality by the poet and then to the same reality by the reader. Through it, both have immediate experience of the self’s existence in a primordial, preconscious, preconceptual world. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of an icon, Freeman calls the iconic poem “an emergent structure” (20). It provides access to “something else” through its formal elements, which help bridge “the ‘gap’ conceived between mind and world” (20, 38). This ontological connection creates a semblance (not an idealist representation) of felt life. Thus, the iconic poem is “embodied subjectivity” (16). It “engages both artist and respondent in opening up potentialities inherent in all creative making” (32). Readers of John Dewey’s Art as Experience will find much to appreciate, but also question, here, as Freeman updates the terminology of many of his arguments, though his book is never directly mentioned. The poems by Stevens Freeman discusses at length are “Domination of Black,” “Of Mere Being,” and “The Rock.” The section on “Domination of Black” is a masterclass on cognitive literary criticism, her sense of how poems both are and create affective responses, and the complex genius of how Stevens puts a poem together. She describes the kinesthetic movement of Stevens’s prepositions, sounds, colors, archetypes, and images. She details the poem’s affective schemata: anxiety, fear, container, cycle, path, motion, boundary, intake, and resistance. These figure into the poem’s agonist and antagonist force dynamics to embody a destabilizing physical and psychological feeling of fear. In this reading, she is less interested in interpreting the poem’s meaning than in exploring “what the poem is doing” (119). She convinces us of the soundness of her critical mode as she persuades us about how the poem’s simple yet intricate elements capture Stevens’s emotional and intellectual transactions between reality and his sensibility. Freeman’s discussion of “Of Mere Being” furthers her argument about iconicity. She poses the question of “how poetry can, constructed as it is by means of language, that very product of the intellectualizing, conceptualizing self, nevertheless break through its own barriers to access the primordial, the precategorial” (51). She answers this in several ways. Within the prosody of “Of Mere Being,” she hears a struggle and a desire for metrical form: “it is as though an abstract metrical pattern is hovering as an invisible ghost behind, beyond, or below the acoustic realizations of linguistic stress patterns in the poem” (53). Then, it is Stevens’s prepositions, his lines’ motion and stasis, and his kaleidoscopic patterns of sound that help deliver us to what is [End Page 255] “beyond thought” (54). The palm and the singing of the foreign phoenix-like bird convey “the world just beyond our conceptual reach” (55). Freeman’s nuanced reading of “Of Mere Being” illustrates how a poem becomes an iconic instance of the continuous metamorphosis of reality. Her interpretations of ways Stevens dwells in “primordial existence before conceptualizing experience” (57) will appeal to many interested in Stevens’s attempts to imagine how things merely are. Freeman characterizes “The Rock” as “a rhapsody of the essence of being.” It is “a revelation of ontological reality accessed through the sensory-motor-emotive processes of sensate cognition” (133). Discussing this poem, Freeman makes a dubious claim that for Stevens, the purpose of poetry is “to create the semblance of the in-visible anima that is the essence of reality.” This anima...