Modern Lyric Poems: From Poetic Genre to Cognitive Category

Literary genres are important concepts for literary scholars and students of literature alike. Yet differences in opinion are common when defining which literary genre a given text fits best. However, my study here takes a step back from that spot to see how critics and other academics can conceptualize a literary genre in the first place. My case study is the modern lyric poem, a well-known literary genre in poetics. The results, never before published, include replies to an informal survey carried out at an international cognitive poetics conference at Osnabrück University in Germany. I begin by discussing handbook definitions and examples named. Then I compare them to results obtained from participants at the academic conference. Results sometimes overlap, aligning with criteria published in handbooks, although there are variations. I consider various reasons why participants might have selected certain examples of the genre, before ending with some suggestions of topics for future research on cognition in poetics.