Cognitive Models of Poetry Reading

In this chapter we are concerned with cognitive models that may motivate emotive and affective reactions in poetry reading which are responsible of aesthetic pleasure. To experiment and verify our approach, we chose the collection of sonnets Shakespeare wrote toward the end of his life. We look into current cognitive theories related to work of art and in particular to literary work, and we fix, as our target, all linguistic items that cause surprise or are unexpected formal expressions. From this we move onto linguistic theories and analyze the import of noncanonical syntactic structures, displacements, and discontinuities that contribute novelty and unpredictability as applied to a language like English which however did undergo substantial changes in its history. At this point we move onto Elizabethan times – the sixteenth century – when Early Modern English substituted Middle English and marked the entry in Modern English. Here we delve into the sonnets and trace all rhetorical and poetic devices used by Shakespeare to make every sonnet a surprise. We then compute thanks to SPARSAR – our system for poetry analysis and reading – different types of complexity measures that are then used to gauge the validity of the choice of what can be regarded as most “popular” sonnets, a list of 35 sonnets. This is confirmed by an accuracy of 89%. Eventually we produce an accurate reading of the popular sonnets using the TTS of Microsoft Speech Synthesis: the analysis of SPARSAR, represented in ssml code, takes care of all changes in pronunciation required by poetic constraints and Early Modern English.