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Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry

Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry Christopher Collins Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry As a verbal artifact, a poem draws upon a number of nonverbal structures in the brain. Even before the emergence of language, certain behaviors had to have been in place, e.g. an increased ca- pacity to bind perceptual data and process them as single events (episodes) and the ability to reproduce perceived actions (mime- sis). These two evolutionary phases, according to Merlin Donald, preceded language, but to allow for the emergence of that specific activity we know as poetry, two other behaviors must also have evolved — play and tool-making. Play supplied episodes with frames and as-if intenüonality, while tool-making skills enhanced mimesis by crafting artifacts that were saved and reused. Palaeo- poetics, which I would define as the study of cognitive skills pre- adaptive to verbal poiesis, is a project that examines play, episodic awareness, mimesis, and tool-making as forming the common foundation upon which all the myriad varieties of oral and written poetry have been built. How did poetry begin? From a cognitive-evolutionary point of view this is not an unanswerable question. If we agree that poetry is a complex operation that the brain performs, agree http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cognitive Semiotics de Gruyter

Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry

Collins, Christopher
Cognitive Semiotics , Volume 2 (s1): 24 – Mar 1, 2008
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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
ISSN
2235-2066
eISSN
2235-2066
DOI
10.1515/cogsem.2008.2.spring2008.41
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Abstract

Christopher Collins Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry As a verbal artifact, a poem draws upon a number of nonverbal structures in the brain. Even before the emergence of language, certain behaviors had to have been in place, e.g. an increased ca- pacity to bind perceptual data and process them as single events (episodes) and the ability to reproduce perceived actions (mime- sis). These two evolutionary phases, according to Merlin Donald, preceded language, but to allow for the emergence of that specific activity we know as poetry, two other behaviors must also have evolved — play and tool-making. Play supplied episodes with frames and as-if intenüonality, while tool-making skills enhanced mimesis by crafting artifacts that were saved and reused. Palaeo- poetics, which I would define as the study of cognitive skills pre- adaptive to verbal poiesis, is a project that examines play, episodic awareness, mimesis, and tool-making as forming the common foundation upon which all the myriad varieties of oral and written poetry have been built. How did poetry begin? From a cognitive-evolutionary point of view this is not an unanswerable question. If we agree that poetry is a complex operation that the brain performs, agree

Journal

Cognitive Semiotics – de Gruyter

Published: Mar 1, 2008

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