[Robert Pecotte]

You can't read anything without the primacy of the Intellect. The intellect interprets the sensate (in this case optical/aural) experience into something intelligible/understandable. Otherwise words are meaningless marks and not intelligible symbols: signs and symbols are based in the Human Intellect. All subsequent emotions are the result of the intellect’s process of translating the symbols/signs into an interior encounter which mimics (or, if you dare, makes spiritually present) the thing itself and not its signifier.

No primacy (first place) of the intellect=no emotions from symbols=no poetry. Emotions are literally secondary as they are a result of the intellect operating on an optical/aural encounter with the symbols/signifiers we call letters that are used to construct the symbols/signifiers we call words. Emotions don’t feel words; they feel what words signify.

Umberto Echo is a famous novelist, but he is also the worlds leading professor of semiotics and is worth reading in that field, especially by philologists, writers and those weird artistic writers called poets.

Fr. RP