The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of ImaginationBecause every literary image is also a mental image, and because every mental image is a representation of an absent entity, Christopher Collins argues, imagination is a poiesis, a making up, an act of play for both author and reader. In a book that stands at the intersection of poetic theory and cognitive psychology, Collins considers the processes by which language mediates mental images to make this play possible. The Poetics of the Mind's Eye