On Poetry and the Science(s) of Meaning

Abstract

The genesis for this special issue arose in a rethinking of the presence of poetry in the cognitive and language sciences that arose as a consequence of two seminal moments in the 1990s. Gibbs (1994) book, “The poetics of mind” presented a comprehensive review of metaphor and other tropes in which they argued, and presented empirical evidence, in support of the thesis that the human mind was profoundly poetic and figurative in nature. At about the same time, George Lakoff (1993) updated his earlier work with Mark Johnson (1980) in his chapter the “Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” There he argues that metaphoric expression is conceptual (and not merely a matter of language) and that this conceptual structure underlies both literal and poetic language. In both of these seminal works, the focus was on understanding the structure and functions of the mind through the analysis of language, including poetic language. We decided to frame this special issue around the obverse question: In the 30 years since the initial writings of Gibbs and of Lakoff, what have we learned from the cognitive and language sciences about poetry? We have gone off and explored metaphor and other meaning-making processes in practically everything that is human, but what has gone on in the world of poetry, where many people used to believe metaphor originated? We were cognizant of the fact that poetry is a ubiquitous feature of human beings (Rasse, 2022), found in pre-literate societies and in the earliest examples of written literature. As such, we wanted to throw the net widely and put out a call for papers that said in part: “We are seeking works that go beyond the mere documentation of metaphor in poetry.” We wanted papers that spoke to general themes about poetry qua poetry. We wanted to have a set of papers that, taken together, looked at poetry in different linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts. We wanted some papers that were largely empirical. We wanted some papers that were largely theoretical. Knowing that there were scholars who, in addition to their academic work, were poets in their own right (as, in fact, is the case with the three editors of this special issue) we hoped that some of these scholars would submit papers that integrated ideas drawn from their academic work along with their embodied experiences in producing poems. We are delighted that the set of papers bound in this special issue met our hopes. There are papers that examine aspects of poetry in Arabic, English, Serbian, and Vietnamese. There are papers that compare poetry across different languages, or from a historical perspective, or that examine the role played by specific psychological characteristics. There are papers that emphasize metaphoric expression in poetry and others that consider conceptual metaphor and figurative construction types such as zeugma. And, there are papers written by scholars who have published books on poetry and bring to bear that experience in thinking more generally about the nature of poetry (e.g., Holyoak, 2019a; 2019b; Young, 2018). Conceptually, the papers can be very roughly grouped into four categories. Two bookends, and then two groups of papers within.