What is it about?
Evaluations of Matthew Arnold's "The Last Word" claim it fails as a poem. A cognitive analysis shows that these evaluations fail to recognize the poem's underlying coherence and its reflection of Arnold's social criticism and life experiences.
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Why is it important?
Both cognitive approaches to literature and traditional literary expertise complement each other in contributing to our understanding of the complexities of human minding: the integration of sensations, emotions, and conceptual reasoning that constitute the way we experience and interact with each other and the world of which we are a part.
Perspectives
When a critic claims that a poem fails to do what its writer intended, it behooves us to takes that with a pinch of salt. Only by fully understanding a poet's "intension" can we legitimately evaluate a poem's success or failure.
Professor Margaret H. Freeman
Los Angeles Valley College
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This page is a summary of: Complexities of Cognition in Poetic Art: Matthew Arnold's 'The Last Word', SSRN Electronic Journal, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2376820.
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