Whereas the power of literature is commonly seen to lie in its ability to evoke images, the force of some literary works is derived from two other aspects of iconic signs: their diagrammatic and metaphorical aspects. Three examples of diagrammatic and/or metaphorical iconicity are discussed. First treated is the diagrammatic homology between world order and word order, e.g., the preference for "The President and the Secretary of State" rather than for the reverse. Then, Dante's 'Purgatory' is used to illustrate the transformation of a diagram of intelligible relations into a series of images comprising a landscape. Finally, the interplay between intersemiotic and intralinguistic iconicity is illustrated by the Latin phrase 'veni, vidi, vici' (I came, I saw, I conquered). (Copyright 1997, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (L. R. Hunter in LLBA 1997, vol. 31, n. 3)