Summary: Using concepts from neuroscience and contemporary philosophy, a doctoral study explores the bodily and emotional sensations that arise when people read poetry and how those sensations influence interpretation.
Source: Tallinn University
Poems are not only objects of semantic interpretation; they frequently provoke immediate sensations and emotions that shape a reader’s experience and understanding.
Kristiine Kikas, a doctoral student at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, investigated the non‑representational sensations that accompany reading poetry and examined how they contribute to comprehension and meaning making.
Her doctoral thesis focuses on what she calls the palpability of language—or sensory saturation—a dimension of poetic language that has so far received limited systematic analysis and application in literary studies.
Kikas frames reading as an impersonal, intersubjective process: the sensations and impulses that arise during reading do not belong exclusively to the text or to the reader, but emerge in the relation between both. Traditionally, poetry has been studied through metaphor and representational meaning, asking what words signify directly or figuratively. Another established line of inquiry, often described as an affective perspective, examines pre‑linguistic or non‑semantic impulses that shape a reader’s response.
Instead of privileging either pure representation or a narrow affective account, Kikas treats language as both a series of propositions and a flowing consciousness—a sequence of statements and intuitive connections that manifest while reading. Her work aims to expand methods of approaching verbal language—typically associated with analytical thinking—so that sensory saturation can be acknowledged and used as a legitimate resource in poetic analysis alongside established modes of interpretation.
To reach these aims, Kikas adopts Gilles Deleuze’s approach to radical empiricism and situates it in dialogue with semiotics, biology, anthropology, contemporary psychoanalysis and cognitive science. This interdisciplinary comparison allows her to articulate how sensory impressions and bodily memories can be engaged in close reading practices.
In her thesis she describes reading as a continual presence in verbal language that can appear more or less intensely: sometimes felt like a color, a posture, or the sound of birdsong. These sensory impressions are not incidental; they form part of how a poem is lived and perceived.
Drawing on neuroscientific accounts of metaphor and the human tendency to process language at a sensory‑motor level, Kikas proposes that readers can use body memory to reenact and embody the words they encounter. In other words, the body’s habitual responses to sensory cues in language allow readers to physically resonate with poetic expressions.
Kikas suggests that the sensations stored in the body and evoked by language can create a sense of oneness between reader and text, a process she characterizes as the reader “becoming” the words. This convergence only becomes visible if the multiplicity of sensations and meanings that arise during reading are noticed and acknowledged rather than dismissed as irrelevant background noise.
Her thesis does not claim that sensory saturation replaces analytical interpretation; rather, it argues that recognizing sensory and affective layers enriches both the experience of poetry and the interpretive work readers perform.
As an initial foray into this area, Kikas’s research opens avenues for further discussion and study. She hopes it will encourage scholars and readers to develop tools and language for identifying and working with the sensory dimensions of poetic language.
Above all, Kikas urges readers who seek to understand poetry to pay attention to subtle feelings and impulses that emerge while reading. Even the slightest sensory or affective response can be the starting point for deeper, more abstract meanings.
About this emotion and poetry research news
Author: Kristiine Kikas
Source: Tallinn University
Contact: Kristiine Kikas – Tallinn University
Image: The image is in the public domain