Difficult poetry processing: Reading times and the narrativity hypothesis

This study presents an experiment that uses reading times as a measure of the processing effort demanded by ‘difficult’ poems, where difficulty is defined as a text-driven response phenomenon associated with resistance to reading fluency. Reading times have been used before to explore the processing of literature, but seldom with the aim of shedding light on difficulty. There is then scope to redress this research gap, also in light of Shklovsky’s claim that the technique of art is ‘to increase the difficulty and length of perception’. In the current experiment, a group of participants read six poems on-screen. The poems are by Mark Strand, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, Susan Howe and Jeremy Prynne, and have been selected based on critics’ remarks on their difficulty or lack thereof. An extract from a novel by JG Ballard was also included to find out how its narrativity would compare, in processing terms, to the more elliptical narrativity of Strand’s and Pound’s poems. The time spent on each line was recorded by software E-Prime, commonly used in psycholinguistics. The results indicate that three of these texts – Ballard’s, Strand’s and Pound’s – were read at a much higher speed than non-narrative poems by Stevens, Hill, Prynne and Howe. The proposed explanation was that it is sufficient for readers to recognize traces of a narrative schema to read the text fluently, even if such text is low in coherence. By contrast, when prototypical narrative features cannot be mapped onto a text, the processing effort as measured by reading times remarkably increases. Overall, the results refine our understanding of the relationship between difficulty and the stylistic strategies associated with it.