What is it about?
No two people read a poem in exactly the same way. They make sense of a text according to their own knowledge, experience, intentions, and motivations. Examples of readings of Emily Dickinson's poem "I heard a fly buzz when I died" show that conflicting interpretations arise from differing ideological stances about the existence of life after death.
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Why is it important?
Explorations of how we respond to poetry can illuminate how we think and feel about our own lives, thus giving us conscious insight into the sources of our attitudes and beliefs.
Perspectives
Understanding how we think and what we feel helps us to fulfill Socrates' call to "know thyself." Reading poetry leads us into experiencing our subliminal sensory-emotion cognitive processes that underlie the way we think and feel.
Professor Margaret H. Freeman
Los Angeles Valley College
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This page is a summary of: Reading Readers Reading a Poem: From conceptual to cognitive integration, Cognitive Semiotics, January 2008, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.102.
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