Abstract
Experiencing Poetry. A Guidebook to Psychopoetics has a twofold aim: ‘to both open up a new field of research, the psychological experiences of poetry, and at the same time develop the field to newcomers, both students and educators’ (p. xiii). The extent to which both aims inform each chapter will be the subject of my review.
The book is formed of nine chapters, the first seven of which are titled in parallelistic fashion following the ‘Poetry is X’ template: X being ‘Structure’ (Chapter 1), ‘Madness’ (Chapter 2), ‘Prettiness’ (Chapter 3), ‘Surprise’ (Chapter 4), ‘Revelation’ (Chapter 5), ‘Power’ (Chapter 6), and ‘Persistence’ (Chapter 7). Each of these key aspects is introduced in a lively style, explored with poems from world literature culled from the ancient to the contemporary period, and tested through reader-response experiments in various formats and designs. The last two chapters advance broader proposals to study poetry from an empirical angle. The progression is one of increasing complexity or social relevance: from ‘Structure’, which is both fundamental and perceivable, up to emotional (‘Madness’, ‘Surprise’), aesthetic (‘Prettiness’), gnoseological (‘Revelation’) and therapeutic (‘Power’) aspects. The last aspect, ‘Persistence’, is another word for civilisation itself.
This macro-narrative structure is mirrored in the writing style employed, which steers away from stilted academic conventions by relying on storytelling devices (e.g., digressions, anecdotes) and conversational register (direct address to the reader; exclamative and interrogative forms; informal lexis, e.g., ‘we want to know for certain that we are not kidding ourselves’, p. 17). The book is indeed profoundly dialogic, as David Hanauer notes in his foreword (p. xi). Further proof that the authors never lose sight of their intended readership lies in the use of keywords (e.g., literariness, randomization) opening each chapter and bullet-point summaries concluding it; worth noting is also the counterintuitive yet effective strategy of introducing a technical term only after its reference has been narratively presented; not to mention the glossary of terms, the ancillary resources with sample questionnaires, and the companion website with audio-visual recordings referred to in the text and boosting the interactive design of the book. In short, the structural, stylistic, and argumentative solutions adopted are exemplary textbook cases of captivating divulgation.
Evaluating how the subject matter itself, psychopoetics, has been developed requires a closer look at each chapter. Chapter 1 begins by defining poetry and psychopoetics. The authors wisely acknowledge that poetry resists univocal definitions, and instead list typical features (pp. 1–2). Psychopoetics is ‘the study of the psychological experience of literature and, more specifically, of poetry in its various aspects and meanings’ (p. 1). It is morphologically modelled after such compounds as ‘psycholinguistics’ and ‘psychonarratology’: these indirectly lend psychopoetics the legitimacy it needs to challenge rival terms such as cognitive poetics and empirical aesthetics. Hanauer acknowledges there might be ‘some arguing whether a new usage of the term ‘psychopoetics’ is necessary’ (p. xii) but adds that the merit of a new (or newly used) concept may lie in its consequences, including bringing ‘new people into the field’, p. xii, and offering ‘a clear integration of the disciplines’ (p. xii).
The authors do mention cognitive poetics and some of its major figures (p. ix). The rationale offered to discard the term; however, is rather weak: they argue that cognitive poetics, despite its merits, is ‘geared at processes of comprehension and interpretation’ and even claim that emotional experiences are ‘hardly envisaged by the cognitive program’ (p. ix). This strong criticism fails to take heed of the increasing centrality played by emotional and affective responses in cognitive poetics – as shown by Stockwell’s chapter on ‘Sensation and empathy’ (Stockwell, 2009) and by Pager-McClymont’s (2022) model of the pathetic fallacy, among others. While a guidebook should not get bogged down in nominalist controversies, it would have still been advisable to offer a more nuanced justification for a term that titles the book itself.
The remainder of Chapter 1 illustrates the idea of ‘prototype poetry’ with a short lyric by Goethe. A prototype is a central member of a class (Rosch 1973), and Goethe’s poem fits this definition due to its unmistakably ‘poetic’ features (as opposed to, say, a postmodernist prose poem). Its analysis allows the authors to explain basic terms (e.g., stanza, verse, enjambment) whilst drawing the reader’s attention to the metaphorical undertones of a poem whose simplicity is only apparent. The two fundamentals of form and significance are thus unveiled as naturally as possible. With a plot twist, the authors even temporarily interrupt their analysis to engage readers in a fill-in-the-gaps task demonstrating just how powerful the effects of rhyme can be.
Chapter 2 introduces basic statistical notions (e.g., significance, sample, outlier) whilst delving deeper into the age-old alliance between poetry and music. It does so by inviting readers to listen to a Portuguese Fado song after reminding them that Homer’s Iliad was sung by rhapsodes. Such a transition from ancient epic to contemporary songs foreshadows the subject matter of Chapter 7, the persistence of poetry, whilst undermining the low versus high culture divide, regarded as a Western phenomenon (pp. 16-17). After listening to the song, readers are invited to rate a list of emotions and to compare their results with those obtained in a study by one of the authors. Ratings across two conditions – with and without access to the translated lyrics – are compared: the results are surprising, but I do not wish to spoil them here.
Chapter 3 delves into the legacy of Russian formalism: repetition, parallelism, foregrounding and literariness are introduced, alongside statistical notions such as factor-analysis and p-value. The authors’ key hypothesis is that repetition gives pleasure, and that this ‘pleasure principle’ holds also for repetitions that are far apart in a text: an example is provided from Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ where a given line reappears over hundred lines after the previous mention. Such a re-occurrence is argued to engender an ‘Aha (Eureka!) experience in the reader’ (p. 45). Such claim is a perfect example of stylistic hypothesis: one that can in principle be falsified, that is, proven wrong – the Popperian concept of falsification belongs here. The experiment reported illustrates the text manipulation paradigm: a poem by Cummings and a version with reduced parallelism were rated by two different groups. Tellingly, ratings on the aesthetic and the emotive dimensions were significantly lower for the version with less parallelism. Although the authors do not acknowledge it, their finding echoes one by Reber and colleagues (2004) showing that repetition is key in increasing processing fluency, which in turn enhances aesthetic pleasure.
Chapter 4 is a sequel to Chapter 3 as it deals with the other side of foregrounding, deviation. Whilst repetition and parallelism mostly evoke prettiness, deviation mostly evokes surprise. Here Shklovsky’s theory of foregrounding is brilliantly condensed into a falsifiable prediction: ‘if you request readers to indicate their surprise emotion while reading, they will preferably indicate passages that are characterized by ostraniene’ (p. 84). The hypothesis is tested by summarising the experiment by Van Peer (2020), a re-print of his classic 1986 Stylistics and Psychology: Investigations of Foregrounding. In this experiment, lines from six different poems were assigned a foregrounding rank order based on the intensity of foregrounding. Participants had to underline the passages that surprised them the most. The results supported (that is: failed to falsify) Shklovsky’s theory, since foregrounded lines were underlined more often than those in the background.
Chapter 5 draws attention to an unjustly underexplored aspect of poetry: its epiphanic, revelatory nature. Keats’ own revelation in reading Chapman’s version of Homer is the starting point for this exploration, followed by a stylistic analysis of the sonnet and a mixed methods questionnaire where Likert scales are complemented by qualitative data elicited in a group discussion. Remarks on the difficulty of the poem and interpretations of various kinds are reported anecdotally, that is, without transcribing the conversations for content analysis. This is not necessarily a limitation, both because qualitative methods are not prioritised (more on this later) and because a summary suffices to showcase the range of responses such a complex sonnet can elicit. In this chapter, the results of a survey are also reported showing that all participants experienced some form of revelation. This is evidence that epiphanies are ‘democratic’ experiences, and not just the preserve of gifted artists and thinkers.
Chapter 6 is concerned with the social impact of poetry on people’s life. The use of anecdotal memories, such as the ecstatic listening of recorded poems in unknown languages, helps build a connection with readers and also reminds seasoned academics that their own expertise is, after all, a child of their love affair with literature. There are indeed countless opportunities to encounter poetry: the authors even provide a list encompassing mainstream media (radio, television, internet), surfaces repurposed for communication (posters, mugs, even one’s body as in the case of tattoos) and social settings (festivals, poetry slams, birthdays). Poetry finds its ways into prisons, war fronts, provides consolation and catharsis; in short, it can improve our well-being.
Chapter 7 delves into the idea – indeed, the fact – that poetry outlives us. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded poem in history, is befittingly presented. Its persistence is not simply a matter of historical preservation, but of contemporary thematic relevance (p. 134). The parallelism abundantly used in the epic lead the authors to re-employ the text manipulation technique: the phonology of the poem was treated as the independent variable by removing repeated syllabic patterns; grammar and semantics, however, were prevented from being confounding variables, since no participant knew the Sumerian language of the epic. Each version was evaluated by a control and an experimental group; participants were also asked to guess the genre of the text. An intriguing finding is that readers’ interpretations for the manipulated version were less informative. Since the educational background of the participants was homogeneous, the finding suggests that loss of structure is tantamount to loss of significance, irrespective of semantic content and grammaticality (p. 137). In the same chapter, intertextuality is refreshingly framed in terms of persistence (p. 143).
Chapter 8 endorses Popper’s distinction between the discovery and the justification of knowledge (p. 154). Traditional literary studies typically create new knowledge (e.g., by proposing new interpretations) but have neither the willingness nor the means to validate extant knowledge. This gap is filled by psychopoetics (or empirical aesthetics, or empirical stylistics). My review has already evidenced the authors’ preference for rating questionnaires. Quantitative methods like these take priority because ‘qualitative methods are more difficult for beginners’ (p. 158). Although the choice is justified in light of the readership, such backgrounding of qualitative methods is at odds with the book’s repeated emphasis on experience: most scholars would indeed agree that qualitative methods (e.g., interviews, think-aloud protocols, diaries, discussion groups) provide a more nuanced picture of readerly experience.
A further hindrance to a fully ecologically satisfactory measurement of literary response lies in the either/or logic of some questionnaires: a multiple-choice questionnaire, for example, required participants to express a single preference to questions concerning, among other things, the referents behind the pronouns in a Shakespeare sonnet (pp. 156–157). Pronouns in Shakespeare’s sonnets, however, are ambiguous, oscillating between a male addressee and a female one. Accommodating such ambiguity by asking to rank alternatives from most to least plausible would have been more respectful of the indeterminacy of literary interpretation. Admittedly, negotiating between the pedagogical demands for simplification and the complexity of literary response is never easy, and my criticism is meant to take seriously the authors’ invitation ‘to look critically at these experiments and try to amend their design’ (p. 23).
Chapter 9 bears the ambitious title ‘Towards a General Theory of Psychopoetics’. The theory itself, however, is squeezed into just three pages (pp. 192–194) where 15 strands of experience are posited to characterise poetic experience. These strands are plausible and resonate with themes developed throughout the book. Factuality, in particular, appears extremely promising to investigate the ‘aura of sincerity and authenticity surrounding poetry’ (p. 192). Still, a more explicit link might have been drawn between these strands and those heading each chapter. ‘Meaningfulness’, for instance, might be conceived of as a function of (at least) ‘Structure’, ‘Surprise’ and ‘Revelation’. All in all, the proposal qualifies more as a working checklist than a theory from which predictions can be derived. Developing an integrated theory of poetic effects and experiences remains an enormous endeavour; Willie van Peer and Anna Chesnokova must be thanked for having traced – in this work as in many other publications – a map of possibilities where research is in pursuit of rigour without ever ceasing to be insightful, passionate, and inclusive.