J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

The image is at once easy to identify and difficult to define. If the image is, in a basic sense, the visual language of poems, the concept also extends to modes of meaning making which sometimes have little to do with visuality, as well as to related concepts such as metaphor and conceit. This chapter explores this complex conceptual field by considering examples by Amy Clampitt, Bernadette Meyer, Hope Mirrlees, Sylvia Plath, and others. It shows that the image serves often to unify a poem or structure its narrative, and it proposes that we approach the image as both procedural and constructed. A single poem's presentation of an image in process or the repetition of an image across multiple poems may, in this way, represent a psychological drama or a narrative of intellectual understanding. From this perspective, images are not merely found; they are made.

In Chapter 7, we outline new empirical evidence that perspective taking depends on the reader’s analogy to their personal knowledge and experience. In the first experiment, participants read narratives that involved either familiar or unfamiliar cultural and social schemas. As predicted, we found that it was more difficult to take a character’s perspective when the events of the story world did not make sufficient contact with the reader’s own experience. A second experiment examined the use of prior knowledge and experience as it unfolds in the course of reading. When readers were asked to focus on places in the text where they were reminded of prior experience, the number of such remindings predicted perspective taking. In the third experiment, we manipulated the availability of relevant personal knowledge more directly: Before reading a story, participants were asked to think about a prior experience that either was or was not related to the experience of the character. As predicted, priming relevant prior experience promoted perspective taking.

Plutarch considered content infinitely more important than style. He deprecated excessive attention to words by writers or by readers and believed that the right way to read classical poetry was to concentrate on its moral lessons and not so much on information (historia) or brilliance of language. Nevertheless, he was himself a master of the formal prose (Kunstprosa, in the idiom of German philology) of his day, and had enough versatility to vary his style not only according to genre but sometimes even within a work, especially in dialogue. At the same time, his writing always shows two very marked characteristics: abundance, and richness of imagery and allusion.

This chapter explores the First World War poetry of Mary Borden, placing it against the backdrop of her critically acclaimed prose record, The Forbidden Zone (1929). Borden published her poetic responses to her war experience as a post script to this text. Like the other fragments and short stories, these poems draw on her experience with the Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1, inviting the reader to see, hear, smell, and interpret the war along with the poilus whom she treated. Borden’s poems offer a record like no other, often adopting stylistic tropes of modernism to articulate the unspeakable. The chapter also examines some very different wartime poems that document her love affair with her future husband, Edward Spears. Powerful and erotically charged, these poems encapsulate a very different kind of war experience, enabling Borden to speak with a range of poetic voices.

To some extent all of the entries in this anthology are, strictly speaking, literary in that they trade in metaphors, allegorical figures, and poetic conceits as well as make use of discernible rhetorical structures and turns of phrase. Part IV therefore offers a survey and closer look at works which, in the broadest generic sense, fall under the heading of ‘literature’ – drama, poetry, and prose fiction. Regarding the latter only (for the purposes of this synoptic view of our representative sampling of literature of the period), the death arts are part and parcel of the adventures found in episodic novels. Accordingly, our three examples of this literary type run the gamut of mimetic verisimilitude from Margaret Tyler’s chivalric romance, to Mary Wroth’s pastoral romance reprising the ethos of the Sidneys’ Arcadia, and Aphra Behn’s captivity narrative reflecting Caroline England’s own ‘here and now’, the slave trade in the New World. What we find in the period is that literature has been not only caught up in and representative of the death arts but also, through its endless strategies to prompt reflection upon mortality, profoundly constitutive of them.

Over a span of a millennium or more, Maya scribes and sculptors in the Maya lowlands used a writing system notable for its formal complexity and close links to imagery. At times, in so-called full-figure writing, glyphic elaboration erupts into a welter of massed bodies, imparting a misleading impression of narrative pictures. Wit and fun seem to abound, along with hints of an exuberant, scribal personality behind certain inscriptions. The stress on physicality ‒ things with interiors, exteriors, and defining edges in between ‒ is thoroughgoing. Efficiencies of graphic presentation lead logically to a design choice, whether to show a full thing-in-the-world, or to abbreviate that display by exhibiting a recognizable feature. As a deliberate category error ‒ is it picture, is it text? ‒ full-figure signs heighten the pleasure of being puzzled. They build in part on the cognitive frissons of the Stroop Effect, in which one set of information collides with another. The pictorial interaction of such signs ranges along one of two extremes: sociable contact that is decorous, restrained, respectful, and an indecorous, emotive striving that might lead to uncertain outcomes. In the most extreme cases, Maya writing oscillates between controllability and a bare containment of feral will in the glyphs.

In recent years, the poetry of Wallace Stevens has begun to attract the attention of scholars in cognitive literary studies as well. Starr’s chapter offers a cognitive analysis of two aesthetic modes in Stevens’s poetry. The first of these is disruption, in which Stevens violates metrical expectations or creates perceptual or cognitive disorientation. The second involves the manipulation of pleasure (either that represented in the poem or that which might be generated in readers) to call attention to formal features of a poem, and at times to help new formal features emerge from a disorderly formal background.

The study of poetry is a study of technique – metaphor, simile, sound, syntax, and so on. Chapter 11 of The Cambridge Companion to Sappho illuminates the technical features of Sappho’s poetry, to help us understand why she was so famous an example of lyric expression in the ancient world.

Is there a way to understand a poem as an intertwining of thought and feeling? If every art, according to Pater in The Renaissance, has “its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm,” “its own special mode of reaching the imagination,” and “its own special responsibilities to its material,” then can we also understand poems to offer unique instantiations of thought, which are inextricable from their imaginative, sensuous, and affective dimensions? Previous chapters have considered the value of poetry as a type of linguistic attentiveness and play, as a practice of vocalization and inscription, and as a way to map the complexities of subjectivity. This chapter follows up on those considerations in order to think about how poems might think, and about how both writers and readers might approach a poem as a crystallized yet open process of thinking and feeling. Not only the presentation of a speech act, nor the account of a subjectivity in formation, nor the formalized play of language, a poem can also depict and spur a process of thought that is, as it were, felt. Via readings of poems by Tracy K. Smith, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Lisa Robertson, this chapter aims to show how poets map and process thought, and how readers think their way through poems.