Processing of obscure poetic texts: Mechanisms of selection

This article reports experiments that attempt to probe the strategies readers adopt when confronted with the task of processing difficult but valued texts, such as 'obscure poems'. Tests and readers' protocols support the proposal that readers confronted by a difficult or obscure poem (such as one by E. E. Cummings) are more attentive to the poem's conspicuous elements - strange terms and neologisms, or culturally resonant ones - and recall them better, and are markedly less attentive to ordinary elements. By contrast, faced with a non-difficult poem, readers seem less oriented to strange words and culturally-resonant elements (and recall them in a more linearly-integrated fashion than did the subjects presented with the obscure poem), and are comparatively more attentive to the ordinary vocabulary-as if, indeed all three types of element (the strange, the resonant, and the ordinary) are equally and linearly intelligible. It is shown that even extremely difficult poetry cannot be totally misunderstood, and alternative processing mechanisms are activated, a crucial one being selection. Where a reader reads an obscure poem, the difficulty of the work imposes a selection of those materials which the receiver will integrate into his/her first readings; this selection is applied to conspicuous units and leaves little space for ordinary words.