Poetry reading

Byron's readers back in the nineteenth century complained of a palpably disruptive reading experience. They found his "ottava rima"rhyme and rhythm unsettling and jarring to the eye and ear. Now, a team of arts and science researchers are combining their expertise to determine why and how these readers found Byron difficult to read and whether readers today have the same complaints about Byron's style.

Dr Andrew Roberts and Dr Jane Stabler of the English department and Dr Martin Fischer of the psychology department have just secured maximum funding of over £50,000 from the new innovations scheme for experimental research to conduct interdisciplinary research into how we read poetry.

The team will be using the new eye tracker machine in psychology to watch how the reader's eyes move, anticipate or recall rhyming words, and the effect of line breaks, and how the poem is laid out on the page in both romantic and contemporary poetry. Combining experimental psychology and literary critical methods in this way will allow the team to draw conclusions on the difficulties of poetry reading and what obstacles people encounter when reading a poem.

Using documented historical reactions to Byron's poetry, the researchers will compare the complaints of Byron's contemporaries to poetry readers today. In the time gap of two centuries, do people still read in the same way? Can we be taught to read poetry or is the way we read intuitive and different for every individual?

The researchers are hoping to reach a greater understanding of how poetry is read. One of the questions they hope to answer is many students find poetry less appealing than song lyrics which are easily remembered and recited but use the same structures and rhymes as poetry.

Next Page
Return to February 2002 Contact