Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics is a remarkable book on several fronts. Ostensibly an introduction to the theory of psychopoetics as defined by the authors, it is ambitious in both scope and depth. On the one hand, its focus is multilanguage, historical, and multicultural. On the other, it adopts both qualitative and quantitative analyses, reaching out directly to readers as well as to researchers in poetic cognition. Its aim is twofold: to establish the field of psychopoetics as an empirical research method at the same time as it opens readers to ways of experiencing poetry in its many forms. Its focus is therefore on “the subjective processes readers go through, as well as examining their effects on the lives of individuals and groups” (viii). The strategy the authors adopt is to lead readers through cognitive discovery in analyses of distinct poetic forms, as well as exposing them to various...

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