Ancient poetry provokes mental imagining on a vast scale. Throughout Greek and Latin literature, the audience is frequently invited to read imaginatively, either through formal tropes, such as ekphrasis, or through the usual narratorial description. The connections between vision and imagination, as well as the mental processes involved in both, have been extensively investigated in psychology, neuroscience and the other cognitive sciences, and are the subject of continued lively debate. The purpose of the ‘Cognitive Visions: poetic image-making and the mind’ conference is to explore the uses and limitations of the body of research for the study of ancient poetry.
