A recent article published in Frontiers in Psychology demonstrated that we appear to have an unconscious appreciation of poetic construction.
In 1932 T.S. Eliot famously argued, “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood”. But can we really appreciate the musical sound of poetry independent of its literary meaning? Apparently yes.
— By Ian Salter
In a recent article published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, Professor Guillaume Thierry and colleagues at Bangor University have demonstrated that we do indeed appear to have an unconscious appreciation of poetic construction.
However, can we appreciate the musical sound of poetry independent of its literary meaning?
To address this question the authors created sentence sample sets that either conformed or violated poetic construction rules of Cynghanedd – a traditional form of Welsh poetry. These sentences were randomly presented to study participants; all of whom were native welsh speakers but had no prior knowledge of Cynghanedd poetic form.
Initially participants were asked to rate sentences as either “good” or “not good” depending on whether or not they found them aesthetically pleasing to the ear. The study revealed that the participants’ brains implicitly categorized Cyngahanedd-orthodox sentences as sounding “good” compared to sentences violating its construction rules.
Interestingly the positive responses from the brainbrain to Cynghanedd were present even though participants could not explicitly tell which of the sentences were correct and which featured errors of rhythm or sound repetitions.
So when you read a poem, if you feel something special but you cannot really pinpoint what it is, make no mistake, your brain loves it even if you don’t really know why.
