Psychopoetics of Rhythm – Chesnokova / van Peer (IGEL 2023)
Channel: IGEL Conference Videos
Date: 04/09/2023

"Psychopoetics is the study of how we, individuals and groups, experience poetry. Its essence is evidence – also of the fact that structures in poetry, including parallelism, are there for a reason, as they produce an effect on readers.

Thus, this paper will report the results of an experiment in which 141 participants read ‘anyone lived in a pretty how town’ by Cummings in the original and in the manipulated form, with the original parallelism deleted. We will discuss the statistically significant differences between the groups and then concentrate on principles of experiencing poetry and its rhythm: ‘soothing’, ‘slowness’ and ‘incantation’."