UC Berkeley

To take W.H. Auden’s “poetry makes nothing happen” at its word would be to ignore what happens while reading a poem: not only linguistic meaning, but also imagined experiences of emotions, persons, places, times, voices, imagery, and sensations. What Poetry Makes Happen draws on theoretical and empirical perspectives from the cognitive sciences to explicate how language on the page guides imagining in the reader’s brain, and to explain the actual effects of ‘virtual’ experiences. Though multisensory imaginings are ‘nothing’ from an external perspective, neurocognitive theory treats them as real happenings constituted by the brain’s circuits for actual perception, emotion, and action. Imagination is not a distinct faculty of segregated fictions, it is a multi-system activity always-already integrated with the cognitive structures of non-literary life. I argue that non-linguistic imaginings both ground and complicate our construals and interpretations of a poem, and connect poetic techniques to aesthetic effects as happening to the reader. Because poetic experience is composed from existing cognitive structures, imagining a poem’s “way of happening” can modify readers’ dispositions and form new cognitive resources. By analyzing these interactions, I make an empirically-grounded case for certain poems’ potential to influence some of what happens in the world.

In order to unpack the intricacies of aesthetic experience itself, and to build from that analytic appreciation to consideration of imagined experiences’ social values, my dissertation alternates between two parallel sequences of inquiry. Both progress from the more textual to the more diegetic dimensions of imagining. Chapters one, three, and five recursively examine John Keats’s vivid-yet-ambiguous “This living hand,” explicating how its textual structures guide semantic/affective, personal/loco-temporal, and vocal/perceptual experiences, respectively. While critics have deemed “This living hand” contradictory or indeterminate, in imagination the hand can be both written and spoken of, presently seen though long dead, held out in earnest yet also manipulative and threatening. Keats’s poem thus demonstrates how the reader’s experience can exceed both physical possibility and logical non-contradiction; indeed, I show that it is the reader’s oscillation between absorption in both the speaker’s and addressee’s viewpoints that generates the poem’s lyric interiority and intimacy. Chapters two and four complicate the aesthetic dimensions of this “Negative Capability,” turning to 20th/21st century poems that leverage ‘impossible’ experiences of systemic perception (Snyder, Hillman, Hass, and Roberson) and cross-racial perspective-taking (Hughes, Hayden, and Rankine) in order to cultivate ecological consciousness and redress anti-black racial bias. By making poetic imaginings into real happenings and analyzing the experiential construals motivated by specific textual features, What Poetry Makes Happen reveals the multimodal intricacy of particular lyric effects and argues for certain poems’ social values.