How Poems See

What makes poems and pictures such powerful forms of life? Why do pictures have so much to tell us? How do we see things in words? How do graphic images, optical images, verbal images, and mental images together constitute ways of understanding the world? Looking at poems and images from Giotto and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickinson and Turner through such modern poets and painters as Stevens, Ashberry, Warhol and Heijinian, we will study sensory and symbolic images, the uses and dangers of likeness, and the baffling confluence of concrete and abstract, literal and figurative, body and mind, matter and spirit.