Scientists are beginning to study how both reading and writing poetry affects the mind. Perhaps the most wonderful scientific finding is simply that poetry is good for our mental health. According to an article on ArtsandMindLab.org, reading poetry can increase emotional responsiveness, help avert depression and burnout, and possibly build empathy:
“There is evidence that poetry as part of a NM [Neurosequential Model] intervention may increase empathy and limited evidence that it may reduce professional burnout among health-care workers.”
“Taken together, our results demonstrate the ability of the human brain to process poetic forms spontaneously, quickly, and implicitly, in the absence of any formal knowledge or instruction regarding underlying construction rules. This study shows for the first time that before we even consider literal meaning, the musical properties of poetry instinctively speak to the human mind in ways that escape consciousness.”
This almost visceral reaction to poetry happens because our brains are literally made to detect poetic and literary language and that we have an intense reaction to it. This reaction leads us to reaching perspectives beyond the immediate situation we are in.
The Goosebump Meter
Reading poetry lights up the mind, as some studies are beginning to show.
One study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience established literal physical as well as mental effects from hearing poetry read aloud using a kind of “goosebump meter” to measure people’s reactions:
“One study found that recited poetry could cause participants to feel intense emotions and subjective feelings of chills. Surprisingly, even subjects with little prior experience with poetry were moved; 77% of them said they experienced chills listening to unfamiliar poems. Video recording of the participants’ skin (via a “goosecam”) captured objective evidence of goosebumps during the readings.”
Another study examined the impact of “parallelistic diction,” that is, ideas that are expressed in parallel forms and structures, a common technique in literary writing. The study says parallelistic diction “intensifies emotional impact and aesthetic appeal across multiple contexts.”
In the article “The Human Brain Is Hardwired for Poetry,” Patrick J. Kiger asserts that “Poetry activates parts of the human brain distinct from those affected by other types of literature,” as shown in studies that use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show how brains process literary language differently. He also speculates that besides intensifying emotions, reading poetry can also improve our cognitive abilities, both in language skills and real-life problem-solving skills.
In short, science is beginning to establish what both poets and readers know: reading poetry gives us powerful experiences and enlarges the mind, enabling us to transcend the minutiae of our particular experience, to think more broadly, and to reach fresh and higher perspectives.
Poets Write About Transcendence Through Imagination
Reaching for the sky via the poetic imagination.
“The Brain is Wider Than the Sky”
As I remarked above, poets and their readers have been seeking transcendence through poetry and poetic vision for centuries. Let’s look at a few poems that deal directly with this experience.
Emily Dickinson, who lived her life dwelling almost wholly within her poetic view of the world, would be first of all poets to proclaim this phenomenon. For after all, as she asserts in the following poem, “the brain is wider than the sky.”
The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and You — beside —
The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As Sponges — Buckets — do —
We may not always feel that our minds are bigger than the sky or deeper than the sea, but with a little help from Dickinson’s poetic way of seeing, they can be. A mind can open up wide enough to hold ideas that are vastly bigger than any particular environment may hold.
Dickinson further ponders the power of the poetic brain in the following poem:
I dwell in Possibility
A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows,
Superior of doors.
Of chambers, as the cedars —
Impregnable of eye;
And for an everlasting roof
The gables of the sky.
Of visitors — the fairest —
For occupation — this —
The spreading wide my narrow hands
To gather Paradise.
Through our minds, with the help of poetic vision, we can imagine places and ideas far beyond anything in our “prosaic” material world, using our imaginations even so far as “to gather Paradise” through employing a poetic view of the world.
Frost’s Birches: Climbing to a Higher View
Another of my lifelong favorite poets, Robert Frost, often writes about humble and prosaic subject matter but perceives in it a surprising transcendence of the common. That favorite poem of my old school textbooks, “Birches,” is just one example. You can read the whole thing HERE.
Bending Birches: Why do they bend?
The poem starts with the speaker describing a favored sight on his Vermont farm, a row of picturesque bent birch trees. His poetic brain immediately highjacks the description as he begins to imagine that they are bent down not because of ice storms (the real, prosaic cause of their posture), but by little boys who have bent them by shimmying up to the top of their slender trunks and riding them down to the ground when the skinny treetop can no longer support their weight.
Here Frost captures not only a fond boyhood memory but an indulgence in the sense that imagination can make something wonderful out of plain and hard reality. The poem’s speaker begins to ponder how poetic imagination can lift us right out of our everyday world, where circumstances may be hard and difficult, and give us a higher and wider view of something wonderful, strange, and beautiful:
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
–“Birches”
He acknowledges that such a state of mind is temporary, and it is perhaps a good thing that it is. After all, “earth’s the right place for love.” Relationships don’t happen in our imagination but in plain, prosaic reality. Yet making that visit up to a transcendent poetic view enlarges and refreshes us, giving us a new perspective when we come back down to our everyday lives. Or, as the poet puts it:
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
–“Birches”
How do we Access Poetic Treasures?
If the idea of enlarging your perspective through the beauties of poetic language and vision appeals to you, where do you begin? If you need a leg up, read the “How to Read Poetry Series” on this site for detailed explanations of how to unfold poetic meaning. But perhaps, to start, don’t be too analytic; just take the plunge. Dip into some famous well-regarded poems: read them through two or three times, and reflect on your reading experience.
In his poem “Ars Poetica” (which means “the art of poetry”), Archibald MacLeish asserts that the best poems make this process straightforward. As he puts it in the first stanza, “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit.”
In his view, a poem shouldn’t explain its meaning but simply embody it. A good poem, therefore, doesn’t ask you to analyze it but to experience it. “Ars Poetica” points out that a line of poetry can call to mind a large and complicated human experience just by describing a simple image. One well-crafted poetic picture can evoke these emotions without much explanation:
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be.
–Archibald MacLeish
Here, he provides two examples of images that conjure meaning and emotion. The simple description of the empty doorway and a fallen leaf evokes a grieved loss directly and powerfully; leaning grasses and lights on the sea can call to mind the meeting place of two lovers and the experiences they had there. In MacLeish’s view, then, one doesn’t decide what a poem means, but rather buries oneself in the words and the experiences it depicts, until it evokes thoughts and emotions from deep inside one’s mind and heart.
“A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit.”
Devour Words, Be Renewed
In one of my all-time favorite poems about poetry, Mark Strand brings MacLeish’s comparison of a poem to “globed fruit” vividly to life when he compares reading poetry to devouring delicious food like a ravenous animal. In the poem, all the speaker is actually doing is sitting in the library reading poetry. But this reading experience brings such a basic and powerful mental delight that a primitive energy is unleashed within him. He feels transported into a different kind of being. He compares his ravished state of mind to that of the more analytical librarian, who observes his transport but does not understand it:
Eating Poetry
By Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
. . . .
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
“The dogs are on the basement stairs. . . .”
In Strand’s description of poem-induced euphoria, he is not literally becoming a dog who licks the librarian’s hand. Rather, he is describing something akin to what the studies we looked at above are showing: humans are hard-wired for poetry. To experience its kind of language can therefore unleash something deeper and more basic than prosaic words alone. It can allow the mind to transport temporarily into an alternate sense of self and way of knowing.
“She does not understand.” Will you?
In Strand’s poem, the librarian is frightened of the power of literature—ironically, since she should be the guardian of it, not scared of it. Perhaps Strand is suggesting that those who prefer to keep their literature at arm’s length, for study and analysis only, cannot guess at the power and transcendence that reading poetry can offer.
Can reading poetry unleash energies from deep within, or transport your mind to a higher perspective? There is only one way to find out: pick up a good, well-regarded poem and bite in. See what thoughts and experiences transpire. Will you too “romp with joy in the bookish dark”? Both science and a myriad of poets suggest that it is eminently possible.
Photo Credits
Tree circle
MRI photo
Statue reaches for the clouds
Birches in the snow
Grapes
Dalmatian on the stairs
Librarian
