Abstract

Our engagements with poetry often leave us with a sense of having been not only aesthetically pleased and emotionally aroused but intellectually stimulated and cognitively rewarded.1 However, explicating the nature of such intellectual stimulus and accounting for poetry’s cognitive values are not easy tasks, given that poetry does not stand in the same relation to truth and knowledge as do science and philosophy. How then to account for the undeniable experience of having undergone a profound cognitive change after engaging with poetry?Turning to the work of Immanuel Kant, who praised poetry above all other forms of art,2 I explore how his account of poetry might help us understand poetry’s cognitive influence on...