the research
July 26, 2018
It seems that what your instructors have been telling you all along is true: to connect with your readers, vivid imagery is important.
University researchers asked 400 participants to
read and rate poems of two genres — haiku and sonnet — with the aim of understanding the factors that best predicted the aesthetic appeal of the poems. After reading each poem, participants answered questions about the poem’s vividness, emotional arousal, emotional valence, and aesthetic appeal.
Their results showed that vividness of mental imagery was the best predictor of aesthetic appeal — poems that evoked greater imagery were more pleasing.
Read more about the study, the results, and the poems in this NYU news post.
The Poetry Department . . . aka The Boynton Blog 