The "experience" effect

“Poetic language may allow a reader to experience, rather than simply understand cognitively, the problem or issue the text presents.” This possible effect of the poetic use of language called the “experience” effect can be illustrated by Wallace Stevens’ poem "The Snow Man," and essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.”

Firstly, during our joint session we said that a poem is something that we experience. And that is true about the poem “The Snow Man” as, by reading the first lines, readers can easily represent the scene in their minds thanks to the style of writing and to the imaged description of the scene: One must have a mind a winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice

Besides, we can assume that many readers have already “experienced” winter with the snow, the cold or the sight of a winter landscape. As a result, they can “experience” the poem at it reminds them of their own experiences, emotions and feelings.

Secondly, we can illustrate this point by referring to one of Stevens’ essays, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” in which he talks about the notion of interdependence between imagination and reality in poetry. Thus, another way of “experiencing” is by the words themselves and the sounds of the words. He writes page 32 that “the deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience” and “words are thoughts …above everything else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds.” In other words, the nature of poetry is to take the words already existing (who are part of the reality) and then to use them to create an imaginary scene. Thus the readers can “experience” a reality that they already know such as remembering the emotions related to the snow, or they can “experience” something they do not know (for example imagining the sight of “the pine-trees crusted with snow”). He adds page 30 that “The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process.” This quote is a good example to illustrate this “experience" effect.

Thirdly, the “experience" effect can also be understood as the role of the poet’s own experience in the poems written. In this very essay Stevens adds page 28 that “the all-commanding subject-matter of poetry is life, the never-ceasing source,” meaning that poems are written about what happens around the poets’ lives, either in their lives or in the society. Their inspiration comes from there. As a result, with the help of the words they create another “reality” in which the readers can “experience” the poems written (as described in the above paragraph). He also puts the thought further by writing page 25 that “My memory is there, which conveys something of the past into the present,” which illustrates the fact that the experience in one’s life is very important in the process of writing poetry and depicting a certain reality.

To conclude, I would like to introduce two other quotes from the same essay, for they sum up perfectly these wo sides of the “experience" effect (that is to say the experience in the readers’ minds and the poets’ own experience put into their poems). The first one is page 36 and the second one is page 31: “The mind…is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality…our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives” and “There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live.”