Embodiment Of Poetic Emotion

As a new approach to reading literature,cognitive poetics involves the application of cognitive linguistics and psychology to interpreting literary texts.It combines the intuitive interpretation with explicit textual meanings.Reuven Tsur is a leading linguist in employing cognitive psychology to explore the perceived emotional qualities in poetic forms.The concept of emotion is an obvious point where literature and cognition meet.The emotional dimension of a literary text,generally regarded as extra-textual and unanalysable,has now assumed a higher profile in cognitive poetics.This paper aims at presenting a cognitive analysis of the embodiment of emotions in poetry.According to Robert Frost,"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." Poets have to employ certain poetic form to reinforce the aesthetic experience by creating a resonance to dominant emotional theme derived by the content of the poem.Poetic language is not abstract symbol.It is the being of emotional thought as a trinity of sound,shape and sense.Cognitive poetics holds that aesthetic emotion is not merely a rational judgment derived from the content of text but a cognitive affective evaluation of the poetic contexts.For research purpose,this paper has chosen The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe as a sample to examine how the poetic forms have given rise to the melancholy theme.The paper will make use of Cynthia Whissell's empirical research on the emotional characters of sounds, and Robert Orenstein's research on the brain structures to explain how the poetic forms can influence the poetic emotional qualities.It is hoped that the current research will demonstrate that the choice of words,the forms of textual structures and the patterns of reasoning are intimately inter-related to each other,forming a trinity,and that poetic forms have emotional value rather than a meaning media.Aesthetic emotion consists of the textuality of poetic text.