What is it about?
How do we know whether the thoughts and feelings expressed in a poem are those held by its author? To what extent can an author be said to be "present" in a poem? This article reviews several recent books that tackle such problematic issues by applying several cognitive theories to poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and William Shakespeare.
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Why is it important?
Poetry is not incidental to our lives. It contributes to understanding how we respond to the world as a result of our emotional and sensuous experiences; the way we act and respond as communities; and how the way we use our language capacities enables us to imagine and create worlds both reflective of and beyond our own life experiences.
Perspectives
The authors of the books reviewed adopt very different cognitive approaches to the literary authors they study. These approaches not only reveal different aspects of their subjects' thought processes but depend to a large extent on the ways the authors themselves are guided and constrained by their own mental states and processes. As one deeply involved in exploring the connections between cognition and the arts, I am fascinated by what new theories and methodologies can teach us about our own cognitive states and processes.
Professor Margaret H. Freeman
Los Angeles Valley College
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This page is a summary of: Authorial Presence in Poetry: Some Cognitive Reappraisals, Poetics Today, September 2015, Duke University Press,
DOI: 10.1215/03335372-3160733.
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