The stress on ‘love’ is immediately followed by another on ‘Human’. Listen, for example, to the word ‘Human’ in the opening of WH Auden’s ‘Lullaby’. An example is the emphasis that is felt on a word placed in line-initial position when the word carries stress, especially when that stress immediately follows another. The notion of accent – a sharper emphasis given to a note, often marked in musical notation – has a strong correlate in linguistic and metrical stress. Transitions between stanzas and sections (in and out) may elicit an emotional response from the listener or reader. A stanza in poetry may be coherent in its meaning in a similar way to a section in music. Certain of these elements have analogues in poetry. Gomez and Danuser, 2007 and Young, 2012, for a summary of relevant work by Stephen Davies and Peter Kivy). Significant attention has been paid in recent times to how the elements of music may translate into emotional effects on a listener (see, e.g. As I will suggest, these two sonic metaphors tell us something about our inner, embodied experience of meeting each other through the medium of language. That these metaphors are widely applied to emotions, and our relation to other minds, cannot go without remark, for even neuroscience has recourse to these tropes in describing its findings. Resonance and attunement are, essentially, sonic metaphors for harmonisation at a distance: effects produced by one body and received by another. The phenomena of resonance and attunement, newly understood, have also begun to clarify the interpersonal nature of the space such poetry inhabits. This essay proposes that recent philosophical, neuroscientific and psychotherapeutic research into the nature and experience of resonance and attunement provides a way of understanding the specifically emotional effects of a lyric poem on a reader. He musical element is intrinsic to the work intellectually as well as aesthetically: it becomes the focal point for the poet’s perceptions as they are given a verbalized form to convey emotional and rational values. The New Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics (1993: 713) defines the lyric poem as one in which musical elements, perceptions and the intent to communicate emotion and thought are brought together indivisibly in the fabric of the poem: John Hollander cites Pseudo-Longinus on this effect: ‘by the blending of its own manifold tones it brings into the hearts of the bystanders the speaker’s actual emotion…’ (Hollander 1985: 7). The peculiar agency of the lyric poem has been formulated in myriad ways over time by poets and philosophers alike. Lyric poetry is an affective art: it engages with emotional experience, and seeks to communicate an experience to others, through the deft use of all the technical means available to the poet.
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