What is the difference between poetics and aesthetics

We controlled for differences between joyful and sad poems by applying several analyses of variance ANOVAs or, in the case of nominal variables, Chi-Square tests. Further, results showed no differences between joyful and sad poems regarding their metrical structure metrically bound vs. One hundred and twenty-eight participants 84 women, 44 men took part in the rating study. The mean age was Inclusion criteria for study participation were having German as one native language and being of full legal age.

All participants gave their informed consent and received monetary compensation or course credit. Participants were instructed to silently read each poem twice, in a calm and attentive manner. After the second reading, participants rated the poems on several items, using a pen and paper questionnaire 1. Our questionnaire included a rating item hereafter: Emotion to measure whether participants assigned the perceived emotional tonality of the respective poems rather to the pole of joy 1 or to that of sadness 7.

In order to evaluate participants' aesthetic appreciation, we used two separate items How beautifully is the poem written? Beauty and How much do you like this poem? Liking , with both items ranging from 1 not at all to 7 very much.

As reported in the Introduction, we derived an integrated measure for overall Aesthetic Appreciation from these two ratings. We did so by averaging the ratings for Liking and Beauty. This pooled index for Aesthetic Appreciation had a high level of internal consistency, as determined by a Cronbach's alpha of 0. Finally, participants were asked to indicate whether they knew the respective poems and to report their age in years , gender, and affinity hereafter: Affinity for poetry by stating to what extent they generally enjoy reading or listening to poetry, ranging from 1 not at all to 7 very much.

Given the size of the corpus, we opted for a between-participants design with the intention of reducing possible fatigue and carryover effects by presenting only a few stimuli per participant. In order to keep the survey short, the 48 poems were divided into eight groups of six poems each. Each poem received 16 ratings, and each participant read and rated six poems—three joyful and three sad ones. The sequence of the rating items and the order of presented poems were randomized between participants.

To test whether participants confirmed our pre-classification of the poems as either joyful or sad, we inspected the mean values of all poems on the item Emotion. On average, participants indicated an affinity of 5. Using the emotional pre-classification of the poems coded in a binary way: 1 joyful vs. We also included intercepts for participants and poems as random effects in this analysis Baayen et al. Figure 1.

Boxplots showing mean values of the used averaged values of Liking and Beauty ratings Aesthetic Appreciation , separately displayed for joyful and sad poems. Our analyses show that Affinity for poetry clearly affects ratings of Aesthetic Appreciation.

Results also show a significantly higher Aesthetic Appreciation for sad than for joyful poems. With all due caution, our findings can be interpreted as supporting theories of pleasure in negative affect that suggest a positive relation between sad stimuli and aesthetic appreciation cf.

Taruffi and Koelsch, Considering the well-known effect of familiarity on aesthetic evaluation cf. Zajonc, ; Calvo-Merino et al. This higher familiarity with sad poems might be the reason why they are generally more appreciated than joyful poems.

The results presented here are certainly limited by the chosen corpus, as well as the personal and textual variables that were analyzed. Therefore, they could be complemented by follow-up studies that include additional situational factors, incorporate a broader exploration of readers' characteristics, and do not exclusively rely on behavioral data. Furthermore, due to the theoretical separation between beauty and other forms of appreciation within the realm of the arts, future studies exploring empirically possible differences between judgements of liking and beauty are called for.

Future investigations on this topic should consider co-occurrence patterns of different linguistic concepts that might reflect different mental constructs by applying corpus-linguistic or qualitative approaches. In addition, such future studies should also aim at explaining a differentiation between different forms of aesthetic appreciation by integrating psychological models of aesthetic appreciation and experience as well as an explanation of the underlying psychological processes for a review on current psychological models of art experience for the visual arts, see for example Pelowski et al.

Whether poetry is the appropriate genre for differentiating judgments of beauty and liking is, however, an open research question. Alternatively, other literary genres of fictions or media forms, such as movies that foster an involvement of readers and viewers with the expression of ugliness, disgust and horror might be more prone for a differentiation of different forms of positive evaluations.

Summing up, our study indicates that sad poetry indeed is appreciated more than joyful poetry. Furthermore, the higher our affinity to poetry in general, the higher our positive evaluations tend to be, independent of a poem's emotional content.

All experimental procedures were ethically approved by the Ethics Council of the Max Planck Society, and were undertaken with informed consent of each participant. Human participants read and rated six German poems each. No vulnerable populations were involved. MK and WM jointly designed the study and interpreted the data.

MK compiled the poetic corpus, gathered behavioral data, conducted data analyses and wrote the paper. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We would like to thank Marissa Gemma and Christine Knoop for useful comments on the manuscript, Valentin Wagner for his helpful comments regarding both the analyses and an earlier draft of the manuscript, and Felix Bernoully for his support with the design of our the figure.

We have reported all other results in a separate study that, complementary to the one presented in this article, includes neither the beauty nor the liking ratings cf.

A visual inspection of normal Q-Q plots showed that both our behavioral and our phonological data were approximately normally distributed. P-values were obtained via lmerTest Kuznetsova et al. Apart from the linear mixed effect analyses, our analyses are based on mean values. Aacheson, D. New and updated tests of print exposure and reading abilities in college students. Methods 40, — Andrade, E. On the consumption of negative feelings.

Baayen, R. Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Bates, D. R package version, 1. Brattico, E. A functional MRI study of happy and sad emotions in music with and without lyrics. Calvo-Merino, B. Towards a sensorimotor aesthetics of performing art. Demmerling, C. Carroll notes that the term is mainly studied in the philosophy of history Arthur C.

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Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Article Contents. This essay proposes a particular poetics using theories developed by the philosophers Georg Gadamer and Richard Kearney.

As noted above the aesthetic is related to the visual. The aesthetic deals not just with beauty, but with the sublime, the grotesque and the uncanny. Aesthetics is seen as a philosophy of taste, it tends to detach itself from understanding art on a deeper level. There seems to be two kinds of views on aesthetics. Firstly aesthetics has been seen as the enjoyment and pleasure received from objects and secondly as a type of knowledge received from objects.

The philosopher Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method writes about aesthetics as a type of knowledge. Gadamer then proceeds to explain why aesthetics is a type of knowledge. It could be suggested though, that what he begins to reveal is a form of poetics rather than aesthetics. He crosses over from one to the other when he begins to see artwork as a being that acts and that changes the person who experiences it.

He is no longer dealing with the surface of the artwork or the viewer as consumer of the artwork. Gadamer embroils the viewer into the process of the artwork. In Truth and Method Gadamer leaves aesthetics and enters into poetics. However this is an example of how aesthetics and poetics overlap forming a grey area.

Regardless of this grey area, aesthetics views art as passive or static, as something to be looked at, not to engage with, while poetics sees art in a different light, as participatory.

Plato and many other thinkers throughout history believed poetry to be a productive act. The poetic act produces possibilities or potentials for being. Producing poetic things such as poems or paintings is the production of variations on how we as human beings might be. The philosopher Martin Heidegger believed our being-in-the-world can be seen as a possibility rather than just an actuality, we can exist in past, present and future.

The poetic act enables us to imagine this past, present and future. The poetic act seems linked to the act of imagining.