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The poetic line and working memory.
Nigel Fabb
Various poetic theorists (Tsur, Hogan, Boyd, Willett, etc.) have proposed that the
poetic line is always fairly short because it must fit into the limited capacity of
working memory (which they incorrectly assume is limited to about seven units).
In this paper I draw on Fabb (2015) to present a developed version of this claim,
which takes evidence from over a hundred poetic traditions, pays greater
attention to the properties of poetic form, and fits better with current theories of
working memory capacity. My account makes no distinction between spoken,
sung or written poetries (but has little to say about fully free verse); in Fabb
(2013) I argue that the length of poetic sections such as the line is not subject to
any psychological limit based on its duration in performance. (Note also that
'line' is not a necessary notion in this account, just a convenient way of
describing a certain kind of section.)
I define a poem as follows.
A poem is a text made of language, divided into sections which are not
determined by syntactic or prosodic structure.
The 'sections' are for example lines, half-lines, couplets, stanzas, etc. Though
section boundaries can coincide with linguistic boundaries, the sections are not
fully determined by linguistic form but are superadded to the ordinary linguistic
constituency. This definition is put to use in the following hypothesis:
A poetic section on which systematic added forms depend must be able to
fit as a whole unit into the episodic buffer in working memory.
The systematic added forms are metre, rhyme, alliteration and parallelism.
These forms depend wholly, or partially, on sections of text. For example, metre
is usually defined in terms of the line (which is of a specific length); rhymes and
alliteration tend to be located at specific points relative to a line or couplet;
parallelism is typically defined over two adjacent lines within a couplet. In the
book (and summarized in the talk) I show that whenever these forms depend on
a specific section of text, it is always fairly small, and crucially that it is likely to
be small enough to fit into the limited capacity of the episodic buffer in working
memory. In the Baddeley-Hitch model of working memory, the episodic buffer
can contain about four chunks, which can further contain sub-parts, adding up to
the equivalent of about fifteen words of connected English prose. This is likely
to be large enough to contain about two lines in most types of poetry (or a very
long single section such as an Arabic bayt). To illustrate, consider rhyme.
Rhyming words may be systematically located at the end of every line, or
sometimes every couplet (i.e. a unit small enough to fit into the buffer). But
there are probably no traditions in which rhymes appear systematically only at
the end of every fourth line (e.g., at the end of every stanza); a four-line section is
too large to fit as a whole into working memory capacity. Note that rhyme
patterns can be defined over indefinitely long stretches of text, but patterns are
not section-dependent in the sense defined here
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The implication of my hypothesis is that certain aspects of poetic forms
are determined over a sequence of words which must be held together in
working memory. I conclude by discussing why this might be, and explore what
other demands there are on working memory when listening to (or composing)
poetry, and how these demands might fit with my proposal that poetic form is
established in working memory.
Selected references
Baddeley, Alan 2012. Working memory: theories, models, and controversies.
Annual Review of Psychology 63: 1-29
Fabb, Nigel 2013. There is no psychological limit on the duration of metrical lines
in performance: against Turner and Pöppel. International Journal of Literary
Linguistics 2: 1-29
Fabb, Nigel 2015. What is Poetry? Language and Memory in the Poems of the
World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tsur, Reuven 1998. Poetic rhythm: structure and performance. An empirical study
in cognitive poetics. Berne: Peter Lang