Just as I am posting about how literature might make you think differently, an essay by me comes out that deals (in its own way) with this very thing. My essay ‘Thinking in Stanzas: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece‘ has appeared in a book called The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Ben Burton. You can read about the volume on the Oxford University Press website here. The line-up of authors is really excellent, and I am pleased to be in it with my rather experimental essay.
      I try to bring together (i) the stanza forms of Shakespeare’s poems, and the way they make us think about something over here, set against or in dialogue with something over there; (ii) certain rhetorical tropes (simile, parallel, analogy) that exploit this juxtapositional pattern; (iii) evidence that we organise certain kinds of cognition spatially, as in the ‘mental number line’ that means those in left-to-right writing cultures tend to place low numbers on the left, high numbers on the right. My point is that poems open up thoughts about habits of thinking, what we gain and lose from our tendency to set one thing against another, true and false parallels.
      The reason it seems relevant now, given recent posts, is that I think poetry really does change the way we think, within its bounds and beyond. Different poetic forms cause our thinking to take certain shapes, offer tangible reorderings of experience. Perhaps this could be subjected to empirical testing. Would prolonged exposure to Spenser’s 9-line stanza (already mentioned in this post) make people more deliberative, or less ready to come to a point? The main point I want to make here, in addition to noting that my essay has been published, is that if we want to understand how literature changes the way we think, we could and should think about form.