After the Avant-Gardes

metrical poetry activates both halves of a reader’s brain simultaneously.
In writing metrical verse, a poet is literally transmitting different sets of
triggering patterns in readers, forcing them to co-ordinate both seman-
tic and spatial elements in multiple processing areas of their brains.
Rhyme—along with other sonic devices like assonance and allitera-
tions—adds yet another element, requiring a different sort of processing.
Jeremy Campbell in Grammatical Man writes that the right brain is
“poor at comprehending consonants and does not do well at syntax.” He
adds, “While it can understand the meaning of word pairs like ‘ache’ and
‘lake,’ recognizing them to be different, it is unable to preserve the same-
ness amid the change; it does not know that the words rhyme.” Despite
these limitations, however, the right brain plays an important role in
poetry, helping readers see larger patterns than merely semantic ones.
First, rhyme folds time by forcing readers to recall previous rhymes and
raising expectations for future ones, thus adding another nonlinear ele-
ment to the poem. In addition, rhymes generally occur in “schemes” or
in complex formal patterns like sonnets. In these cases, the right brain
helps readers perceive the formal architecture of an entire stanza or
poem.
Though not good at syntactical coding, the right brain, according to
Campbell, is good at “detecting pitch, intonation, stress, cadence, loud-
ness and softness.” It can also construct

imaginary “situations” into which these various different non-verbal items

of information might fit and make sense. On hearing the sound “bee,” the

left hemisphere will be dominant if it is clear that the speaker is talking

about the letter b. However, if the speaker says, “I was stung by a bee,” the

right brain will be more accurate in identifying the meaning of the sound.

The right brain is not only good at fitting words into larger, narrative con-
texts, it also knows “what words connote, what associations they have”;
it recognizes “the ridiculous and inappropriate,” and is “aware that words
and sentences are embedded in a wide matrix of relationships.”
We have already noted how poststructuralist critics tend to define
language and literature in terms of left-brain decoding. Literature, how-
ever, involves more. Campbell remarks that in limiting interpretation to
the functions of the left brain, “Meaning converges into the sentence
instead of diverging out into wider contexts” and adds:

The right hemisphere corrects this tendency to constrain meaning. It

makes the brain as a whole less literal-minded. It probably plays a role in

The Enchanted Loom: A New Paradigm for Literature 157