Poetic Attentiveness: How Poetic Language Refines and Directs Reader Attention
Overview
This essay examines the relationship between poetic form and the cultivation of attentiveness in readers. It argues that poetic language functions as an instrument for turning and refining audience attention rather than merely a set of formal devices. The paper explores how poets use techniques such as exoticism, mysticism, imaginative imagery, and musical elements to engage and sustain reader focus, drawing on Emily Dickinson as a primary example.
What this essay covers
- Introduction establishing poetry as attention-refinement rather than formal device generation
- Analysis of how poets combat boredom through exotic and mystical elements
- Discussion of poetic techniques including imagery, diction, rhyme, meter, and musicality in capturing reader attention
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Poetic Attentiveness
A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or effect. The poetic language might be understood better as an instrument for turning and refining the audience's attention. Research in philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology proves that close reading of poems enhances the attention of individuals.
Alford says that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for turning and refining the attention, identifying the crucial link between poetic form, as well as the forming of attention. She further offers new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object in poetry (Mariani 40). The poets of boredom help people to get rid of their tediousness and regain focus. This is usually achieved through exoticism in their writings and displaying of mysticism. These poets create fantasies, which they tend to elaborate using imaginative pictures that draw the interest and attention of the reader.
The poems use a lot of enticing words that express incredible feelings in the mind of the reader. Some of the terms used in poems are unrealistic but inspire readers to read more as a matter of entertainment and fantasize about the good experiences, even beyond what they can afford (Xu 109). For example, in one of Dickinson's poems, a line reads: Blazing in Gold and quenching in purple, leaping like leopards to the sky (Dickinson).