Poetry and the Ordinary Reader: A Study of Immediate Responses

Abstract

Within the total picture of literary communication, the reader has usually been an expert, mainly the literary critic. This article explores the immediate responses reported by a group of ordinary readers after reading a contemporary poem by Richard Eberhart. These responses are classified according to typical operations: staging, hedging, citing, associating with key words, paraphrasing, normalizing and generalizing. Examples of each type are discussed.