Poetry Suits the Unconscious, Says Frontiers
In a recent article, published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Psychology, Professor Guillaume Thierry and his colleagues at Bangor University articulate the fascinating relationship between poetry's ability to spark joy through sound before even approaching the critical eyes of the reader. The study, reposted by Medical Press and referenced below, brings to the fore a concept that many poets intuitively know all too well: that meter, rhyme, and alliteration alone can communicate meaning. From the top:
"Poetry", explains Professor Thierry "is a particular type of literary expression that conveys feelings, thoughts and ideas by accentuating metric constraints, rhyme and alliteration."
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.
The authors also mapped Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP) in participants a fraction of a second after they heard the final word in a poetic construction. These elegant results reveal an electrophysiological response in the brain when participants were exposed to consonantal repetition and stress patterns that are characteristic of Cynghanedd, but not when such patterns were violated.