![poetic meter poetic meter](https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/creative_writing/pattern_and_variation_aural/images/20061002100511_570.jpg)
Although regular metrical patterns have been spurned in western poetry by many of the avant-garde authors of the twentieth century, recently regular meter as a stylistic feature has resurfaced even in cutting-edge poetry as a consequence of the “new orality” of movements such as “spoken word,” slam poetry, etc. The use of these “poetical” features of language can be traced back several 1000 years and is likely to predate by far the written record of human language. In infant-directed speech, play, religious, and social rites, festive events, and other social occasions, almost all cultures of the world use “special” language featuring the superimposition of metrical patterning and sound similarities of various types. The present results are explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive fluency, which links structural features of poetry with aesthetic and emotional appraisal. Together these findings clearly show that both features significantly contribute to the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry and thus confirm assumptions about their impact put forward by cognitive poetics. Both rhyme and regular meter led to enhanced aesthetic appreciation, higher intensity in processing, and more positively perceived and felt emotions, with the latter finding being mediated by lexicality. Participants listened to stanzas that were systematically modified with regard to meter and rhyme and rated them.
![poetic meter poetic meter](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ropppt-131021152257-phpapp02/95/meter-in-poetry-15-638.jpg)
In the present experiment, we tested the influence of meter and rhyme as well as their interaction with lexicality in the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry. More recently, in the field of cognitive poetics, these traditional assumptions have been readopted into a general cognitive framework. Hypotheses that postulate such effects have been advocated ever since ancient rhetoric and poetics, yet they have barely been empirically tested. Drawing on four line-stanzas from nineteenth and twentieth German poetry that feature end rhyme and regular meter, the present study tested the hypothesis that meter and rhyme have an impact on aesthetic liking, emotional involvement, and affective valence attributions. Metrical patterning and rhyme are frequently employed in poetry but also in infant-directed speech, play, rites, and festive events. 4Institute of Medical Psychology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany.3Institute of Comparative Literature, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany.
#Poetic meter free#
2Institute of Comparative Literature/Cluster of Languages of Emotion, Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.1Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Neuropsychology, Leipzig, Germany.
![poetic meter poetic meter](https://s3.studylib.net/store/data/009786539_1-24fec33b537ef31ae2d7e317dbcebfc6-768x994.png)
Christian Obermeier 1* †, Winfried Menninghaus 2 †,