What is a “difficult poem”? Towards a definition

Abstract

Abstract Modern poetry developed and transformed difficulty into a prominent aesthetic norm of poetry. The abundance of difficult poetic texts necessitates a study of the corpus. After differentiating between the way difficulty is perceived in poetry and in other communicative acts, I present the approach that I have adopted for the purpose of studying difficult poetry. In contrast to other studies which have examined difficulty from the author's perspective and, as a consequence, described factors that cause textual difficulty, I propose to examine the subject from the reader's point of view. The reader, after all, is the one who feels or does not feel the difficulty. The concept ‘difficult poem’ is necessarily interdisciplinary and the question of what is “difficult” involves cognitive psychology and its models of text comprehension. Following a discussion of these domains, I present the “definition” that I propose for the ‘difficult poem’.