Words

Verbal

Homer worked only with spoken words. Authors of prose fiction work only with written words.

Audiovisual

Oral narrative became drama with the addition of extra speakers and actions. Film replaces stage sets with locations.

Visual-Verbal

Representational art becomes sequential art story-telling with the addition of extra pictures, captions and speech balloons.

Nowadays, two main creative groups work only with words: poets whose works are meant to be heard or read and authors of prose fiction which is meant to be read.

The paradox that I find is that Poul Anderson in particular vividly describes natural phenomena so that his readers should be able to imagine the colours of a sunset, the brilliance of the Milky Way etc. One problem with this is that some of us, maybe only a very few, lack any ability to visualize. The more basic question is whether the prose author is trying to do with words alone what can only really be done by pictorial art or on film.