CHIARA BOZZONE THE MIND OF THE POET: COGNITIVE AND LINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES The Mind of the Poet: Cognitive and Linguistic Perspectives 1. INTRODUCTION: STUDYING THE POET’S MIND What happens in the mind of a poet when poetry is created? The ques- tion already seems prohibitively difficult when dealing with a living poet, whom we can observe as he exercises his craft and interrogate about it. Even today, the creative process is often regarded as mysterious, and the idea of the Muses (and Platonic enthousiasmós) has proved enduring in the Western tradition. The poet and Nobel prize winner Czeslaw Milosz touched upon this topic in a 1968 poem titled Ars Poetica? 1 : In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing its tail. In fact, many writers and artists (including Milosz himself 2 ) have de- clared themselves skeptical of, or openly opposed to, the scientific inves- tigation of creativity. With Homer, this same question proves at the same time both harder and easier: harder, because we still know very little that is certain about the specific conditions under which the poems were created; easier, be- cause we know much about the general conditions under which tradi- tional epic poetry is created in oral traditions (starting from the South Slavic epic tradition studied by Parry and Lord). Oral-formulaic theory has presented us with a compelling case of how the poet puts together his songs by relying on a trove of traditional expressions (formulas) and tra- ditional story schemas (themes); thanks to this work, the building blocks of the poetry are now in plain sight. What we still know little about is how these building blocks are assembled in the poet’s mind as he com- 1 C. Milosz, New and Collected Poems, London 2001, 240-241. 2 «I am skeptical as to the investigation of creativity and I do not feel inclined to submit myself to interviews on that subject» (reported in M. Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, New York 1996, 12). 79