Abstract
This chapter is the first of three analytical chapters, focusing on the lack of difficulty. Strand’s ‘The Late Hour’ and Betjeman’s ‘Loneliness’ are virtually devoid of LIDs. By contrast, they feature aids to comprehension, processing and interpretation in the dimensions of accessibility, readability and interpretability, respectively. Shared schema, immersive techniques and concrete settings enhance accessibility; syntax/line match, narrativity, repetition and stanzaic structure enhance readability; interpretability is ensured by an appeal to intrinsically meaningful themes. Although less explicit than business letters or recipes, easy poems draw on a ‘ready-made’ literary meaning which can be retrieved top-down. High intersubjective topic agreement, elaborations on emotions, high reading speed and a tendency to paraphrase the text are the most notable RIDs elicited by this aesthetic typology.
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Castiglione, D. (2019). Processing Baseline: The Easy Poem. In: Difficulty in Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97001-1_6
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