From Robert Frost to cognitive poetics : a theory of poetic experience

Abstract

The poetic experience "" the experience of reading poetry "" is fundamentally an embodied, mimetic and metaphoric experience. It is an experience available to all who can read the poem because the poetic experience is predicated on the common constitution and orientation of the human body. The poetic experience entails a complex dynamic of meaning-making that is predicated on the fundamental processes of the human body. This embodied, mimetic and metaphoric dynamic was perceived by the poet Robert Frost, who formulated a series of diverse poetic and aesthetic theories. These theories, loosely speaking, are: his theory of metaphor; theory of correspondence; and his theory of sentence-sound. These theories, however, are underdeveloped and scattered across fifty years of letters, essays, notes, and lectures. This thesis brings together and synthesises this disparate material in order to formulate a single coherent theory of poetic experience. The poetic experience is dependent on the embodied processes of meaning-making which are, in essence, imitated by the reader of the poem, who engages in a process I call self-recital. This engenders a change within the body of the reader, which in turn changes his or her perception and understanding. The reader adopts the posture, or stance, of the poem and is thereby put in the state of mind of the poem. This is essential to making sense of the poem. The reader, in essence, must revert to the meaning-making processes that were employed to produce the poem. This is, in one instance, a rapport or "correspondence" shared between reader and poet, but in another, larger instance, it is a correspondence shared between all potential readers, because of the common embodiment shared by all human beings. This thesis, however, goes beyond Frost's original ideas. Or, rather, it brings these ideas into the context of more contemporary research, most significantly, areas of modern research including neuroscience, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind. This Frostian theory of poetic experience resonates with contemporary research into the role of the body and brain in meaning-making. In fact, many of Frost's ideas prove to be highly prescient with regard to more contemporary research, while resonating strongly with the theorists of his day. William James and John Dewey are significant with regard to the latter; Mark Johnson and Antonio Damasio are significant with regard to the former. In effect, this thesis triangulates the synthesised Frostian theory of poetic experience with the Pragmatists, James and Dewey, and our modern understanding of the body and mind. Modern researchers, like Johnson and Damasio, but also Daniel Dennett and other theorists who feature in this thesis, can be seen as the inheritors of the Pragmatist tradition. Triangulated in this way, the theory of poetic experience as espoused here has important implications for our understanding, not only of poetry and other aesthetic experiences, but for the processes of meaning-making more broadly.

Date of Award	2013
Original language	English