Experiencing Poetry. A Guidebook to Psychopoetics

Abstract

While generations of poets around the world have taken direct inspiration from Plato’s contemplation of beauty and truth, the Greek philosopher fiercely criticized poets and even insisted to expel them from his ideal state. He believed that poetry “feeds and waters passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule”; consequently, society risks at being ruled by “pleasure and pain.” But is there any evidence for his assumptions? Is there proof that linguistic elements cause emotional reactions? Does poetry about pain really make us suffer? And how can we collect independent data to confront different assumptions about the effects that poetry has on its recipients? For those who find these questions interesting or troublesome, Experiencing Poetry. A Guide to Psychopoetics by Willie van Peer and Anna Chesnokova will help find reliable answers.The term psychopoetics is used here in a different sense from that adopted by Felman or Bal, who aimed to relate psychoanalysis to the studies of literature. Van Peer and Chesnokova define psychopoetics as “the study of poetic experiences, of what goes through you when you are confronted with poetic texts” (viii). In their approach empirical results are a central component to their argument. They intend “to expose claims about the psychological workings of poetry to serious and methodological tests as well as instruct our readers on how to apply and interpret such tests” (viii). Marrying “age-old traditional poetics to more recent methods of investigation, developed in the social sciences” (17), Van Peer and Chesnokova bring solutions to those who are tempted to investigate how people experience poetry, but are discouraged by the subjectivity of textual analysis alone.The book is a timely publication. The empirical study of literature has been expanding for several decades now (van Peer; Miall and Kuiken; Bortolussi and Dixon; Koopman). Van Peer is one if its founders and both authors have made a compelling case for the development and recognition of this type of investigation (Chesnokova and van Peer, Versus; Chesnokova and van Peer, Znaki Czy Nie Znaki?; van Peer and Chesnokova). Moreover, as the authors point out in the introduction, cognitive poetics has also brought a psychological dimension to the research about our reading and understanding literature (Gavins and Steen, Stockwell, Tsur). Nonetheless, the uniqueness of this monograph lies in its focus on an evidence-based approach studying the emotions we experience while being exposed to poetry (and not to literature in general).What is more, the “book [is designed] for an international audience” and the authors open their research to “the multiplicity and variety of cultural expressions,” bearing in mind that “different cultures handle poetic issues in different ways” (ix). At the same time, their examples include poems written not only in languages other than English, but also in different epochs. Expanding the intercultural and historical dimensions is another reason why this monograph is distinct and very much welcomed.As its subtitle indicates, Experiencing Poetry is a guidebook. It is written for students and early-career scholars with no background in poetics. However, employing tools of social sciences to examine the effects of poetry is a valuable pursuit for scholars in literature and/or linguists who want to expand their academic horizons.The book is well organized. It is divided into nine chapters with intriguing titles which follow an elegant pattern, e.g. “Poetry is Madness,” “Poetry is Prettiness.” The authors’ accessible style and their direct appeals to the reader (“wait, do not run away”) render the reading process enjoyable and involving.Each chapter starts with a list of keywords indicating its content and closes with a set of core issues and further reading recommendations. In the final part of the book there is a glossary of the most important terms followed by ancillary resources that include several sample questionnaires—very useful for readers who want to conduct their own experiments. Another comfortable solution is linking this book to a web companion developed in conjunction to its content.The first chapter opens with a straightforward question: “What is poetry?.” To avoid distracting discussions, the authors propose to think of poetry in terms of prototypes: the more of the qualities are present in a text, “the more people will be likely to deem it a poem” (2). They consider a variety of elements, such as the graphic layout of a poem, the stanza forms, rhyme, meter, figurative language; pointing out that these are the structures involved in causing psychological effects in poetry readers. The fair thing is that the authors do not make us wait for the evidence on whether all this is true. Chapter 2 introduces the basic notions of statistics, and instructs us how to apply the tool of collecting data in psychopoetics, i.e. a questionnaire. Van Peer and Chesnokova invite readers to participate in the first experiment and lead them step by step through their methodology, calling attention to tricky aspects of statistical analysis.Chapters 3 and 4 discuss two central premises of stylistics: parallelism and deviation. Once the reader acquires the knowledge about these two vital poetic mechanisms, the authors demonstrate more instruments with which to seek evidence-based support for their effects. They discuss a method of manipulation and present an experiment which requires a control group and an experimental group. They expose one group of readers to an original text and the other one to a text they deprived of its carefully identified parallel structures. On their way to compare the readers’ reactions, they introduce us to the Likert scale, a standard tool for quantitative data collection.Chapter 5 is dedicated to the poetic effect which might be called revelation or epiphany. As the authors point out, revelatory moments when people experience goosebumps or suddenly find a new understanding of some situations while reading a poem are rather spontaneous and cannot be planned and thus measured with quantitative methods. As a result, this investigation of poetic epiphany forms an apt moment for presenting qualitative research methods. At the same time, the experiments described in this chapter serve to discuss the structure of a sonnet and the concept of intertextuality—both important topics of poetics.The following chapter treats different aspects of power that poetry exerts over individuals and societies. The authors summarize the already existent analyses that contributes to the theory of psychopoetics. They direct our attention to the phenomenon of consolation—the area where the power of poetry becomes particularly visible. The explanations for its mechanisms are traced from Aristotle’s Poetics and his idea of catharsis to recent studies on bibliotherapy. A separate subsection of this chapter reports the findings of studies on the emotional influence of foregrounding on readers, which reveal that “the formal makeup of the language plays a dominant role” (123) in emotional effects.Whereas most of the poems referred to in previous chapters belonged to Western context, the seventh chapter opens with a discussion of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written in the cuneiform script in the Sumerian language. The authors’ evaluation of this text includes helpful cross-references to previous sections of the book. The second part of this chapter focuses on oral poetry in Africa. Although each text of this subgenre undergoes significant changes affected by different performers of subsequent generations, the main themes persist throughout the centuries. The authors present us with the psychopoetic perspective of this phenomenon, reflecting upon the social reasons for the re-emergence of these themes.Chapter 8 is entirely devoted to summarizing the fundamentals of statistical methods that were demonstrated earlier in this guidebook. While it solves some puzzles of methodology, we must remember that this monograph is not a manual on statistical methods in the Humanities. For readers interested in more detailed information, the authors offer valuable source recommendations.The final chapter is entitled “Toward a General Theory of Psychopoetics” and it recapitulates the most important points from the previous parts. This section closes with a list of hypotheses concerning the poetic experience, which are not only the “main strains of psychopoetics,” but also “make a starting point in an evidence-based search for truth” (192). This welcomes readers to undertake research within psychopoetics and provides them with a set of concrete inspiring ideas for further exploration.As an overall reflection, this book boasts three especially noteworthy qualities. Firstly, the authors use an engaging and often storytelling style to demonstrate how an in-depth literary analysis can be matched with empirical accuracy using evidence-based methods. Secondly, another strength of this book is how it tackles ancient and modern poetry to create a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective. It proposes the idea that psychopoetics as a study of emotions evoked in readers of poetry offers a universal path for understanding poetic experience. Finally, in selecting poems to be analyzed, the authors often refer to our social and everyday contexts: they discuss poems which are used for songs, films, or even for video games. They position poetry where it belongs—in the real world, with the strong reminder that “it is not the sentimental stuff about loneliness, beautiful nature or romantic love, but that is a force that may deeply affect your life” (101).The authors’ open and welcoming attitude to the reader, their earnest passion for poetry and the approach they propose, will surely attract new researchers not only to psychopoetics, but to academic path in general. I recommend this book to be ordered by university libraries, where it will be a resource for scholars and students engaged in literary analysis, stylistics, translation studies, psychology and other areas across a wide range of disciplines.