In this passage from an influential article by Frederick Turner and Ernst Poppel the nature of meter's profound effect on the human organism is outlined. The entire article is worth reading for its challenging and compelling argument regarding meter and how our brains work. Robert Graves speaks of the shiver and the coldness in the spine, the hair rising on the head and body, as does Emily Dickinson. A profound muscular relaxation yet an intense alertness and concentration is also recorded. The heart feels squeezed and the stomach cramped.
Outside stimuli are often blanked out, so strong is the concentration.
The imagery of the poem becomes so intense that it is almost like real sensory experience. There is an intense valorization of the world and of human life, together with a strong sense of the reconciliation of opposites-joy and sorrow, life and death, good and evil, divine and human, reality and illusion, whole and part, comic and tragic, time and timelessness. There is a sense of power combined with effortlessness.