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Hi Nicola, thanks for the feedback! Much appreciated. As regards the 'tests' I was referring to, the most famous and perhaps most influential of its kind, was from TS Eliot: "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." The reference is here: https://tseliot.com/prose/dante and he very much sees it as a test.

I also had in mind what John Ashbery called an “almost satisfactory definition” [by the nineteenth-century French poet Banville]: “[ Poetry is] that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds … that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.” Neither of these is a rigorous method, but I guess many readers of poetry would recognise instances where the sound of the poetry has an impact - e.g. moves or stirs us in some way - before we have comprehended the meaning(s) of the lines. I think "awakening sensations" nicely catches what is meant by impact here.

A final thought. Mostly we are talking about the sense of hearing being engaged by poetry. But we also move our bodies to its rhythms too, sometimes. For instance, if I read Tennyson's 'Charge of the LIght Brigade, it's hard for me not to walk around as I do so... https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade Try it out for yourself!

I hope that helps and thanks again for the comment!

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Thank you Jeffrey. This is really helpful. I will follow-up with great interest and get back to you.

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Hi Jeffrey,

Commenting on posts is a relatively new experience for me, but you asked for feedback so I’ll go outside my comfort zone. At school, my English teacher’s report said “Nicola must read more non-scientific books.” It’s only now that I am trying to make up for lost time. I enjoy your posts because I always find something interesting to think about or ideas/people to follow up that are completely outside my experience. Your last post ‘Neruda’ almost made me write a comment about your words “And it passes every test about poetry needing to impact your senses before your mind.” Here is where my scientific interests overlap with your literary ones. Any other thoughts about poetry ‘impacting’ senses? And the use of the word ‘impact’?

PS I was introduced to Taylor Swift’s songs recently on a long car journey with my grand-daughter, so I wasn’t out of my depth this time 😊

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