Paying Attention:
Cognitive Psychology in Eighteenth-­Century Poetry
Melissa Bailes
Tulane University
Our modern age obsesses over attention as a gauge for successful personal interaction with outside stimuli as well as for society’s collective, psychological
well being in response to technology and expectations of multitasking in nearly
all sectors of life. How does one sustain attention in the midst of many distractions, and what biological and thought processes occur in selecting and maintaining one’s point of focus? Margaret Koehler traces these concerns of contemporary
cognitive psychology to eighteenth-­century theory and literature in her Poetry of
Attention in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She explains that
eighteenth-­century poetry’s long-­recognized absorption in minute details and its
impulse to catalog and categorize not only represent “a particular state of mind:
methodical, experimental attentiveness” in the poem’s speaker, but also demand
this attention from the reader (2). According to Koehler, this requirement of close
attention sets apart eighteenth-­century poetry, contributing to its reputation as
potentially alienating and difficult for modern audiences; however, for her, the
solution to this readerly challenge also lies within the poetry itself, as many
of these poems assume a pedagogical quality, instructing readers in how and
where to direct one’s attention. Over the course of her study, she incorporates
both familiar and lesser-­known poems to set forth attention as a “unifying concept” that “uncover[s] a new coherence across eighteenth-­century poetry” (85).
Koehler begins her “history of attention” with the rise of empiricist philosophy (15). She analyzes “the filter model” typically attributed to 1950s cognitive
psychology, defining attention as a filter that selects among stimuli, and reveals
eighteenth-­century articulations of this theory. In particular, Koehler charts the
era’s shift away from early perceptions of this filter as involuntary, passive, and
automatic (as in the writings of John Locke and Gottfried Leibniz) to later depictions of the filter as requiring a voluntary, active response of the mind (as in
Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart). She outlines the close connection between
memory and attention as well as between introspection and outward attenThe Eighteenth Century, vol. 56, no. 4 Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
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tion. Koehler displays that eighteenth-­century theorists frequently exemplify
children’s short attention spans to demonstrate both sides of the in/voluntary
attention debate, providing opportunities to encourage curiosity (Locke) and
improvement through education (Isaac Watts). Acknowledging the difficulty
of composing a historical study of attention due to the concept’s “sometimes
muddled intersections” with categories including “sensation, perception,
memory, vision, and consciousness,” she often frames her chapters to investigate more deeply into these intersections (16).
Chapter 2 examines manifestations of the filter model in mock-­heroic poetry,
highlighting the mode’s playfully selective prioritizing among clashing stimuli
that tests “what happens when petty subjects are admitted into the exclusive
realm of heroic style” (61). Again drawing on 1950s cognitive psychology,
Koehler recounts what E. Colin Cherry called the “cocktail party problem,”
in which listeners must tune in to one voice among many, and she notes that
mock-­heroic poetry “refuses the limits and constraints” of such filter models of
attention. This poetry instead experiments with extremes of focus and distraction, finding an ideal in the middle and emphasizing “deliberate, voluntary
attention” (83). Briefly analyzing poems including Alexander Pope’s The Rape
of the Lock (1712), John Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week (1714), and Jonathan Swift’s “A
Description of a City Shower” (1710), she displays how mock-­heroic enhances
and improves a reader’s ability to attend.
In her third and perhaps most absorbing chapter, Koehler performs various close readings and discusses the ode’s dramatization of attention through
encounters between a speaking voice and an object of address. Although she
adheres to conventional understandings of the eighteenth-­century ode’s shift
away from primarily attending to outside stimuli to introspection, she complicates this narrative by demonstrating the gradual and incomplete nature of
this transition by mid-­century, as well as ways in which earlier poets anticipate
the verses of William Collins and Thomas Gray. In this chapter, Koehler analyzes what she deems the “most emblematic” reference for her project, a line
from William Congreve’s “On Mrs. Arabella Hunt, Singing” (1692), where the
speaker’s voice is juxtaposed with that of the vocalist, and the speaker ultimately focuses all attention on this outside voice, silencing himself with line 12,
“Let me be all, but my Attention, dead” (92). Koehler identifies this expression
as looking forward to William Wordsworth’s “serene and blessed mood” (100).
Brimming with careful and convincing close analysis, this chapter interrogates
the “reflexive relationship between calling voice and invoked object” (99).
Investigating kinds of attention paid with different senses, Koehler’s fourth
chapter cites modern attention research confirming that sensory modalities
can perform concurrently without interfering with one another. She examines
poems portraying senses as mutually enhancing and references, for instance,
moments of synaesthesia in Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744).
She also explores humorously negative instances of this mutual strengthening
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BAILES—COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
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of senses, as in Strephon’s conflated visual and olfactory experience in Swift’s
“The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732). Koehler then surveys poetry in which
negative emotions, such as grief or sadness, result in either the dulling (Anne
Finch’s “The Spleen” [1702] and Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West”
[1742; pub. 1775]) or the heightening (Akenside’s Pleasures) of the senses. Also
examining poems that delineate the effects of night on the senses, she demonstrates ways in which poets voice the intensification of non-­visual sensory attention, referencing, for instance, Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
(1751), where in line 4 the departing plowman “leaves the world to darkness
and to me” (118). Koehler explains that eighteenth-­century poets experimented
with sensory experience through these various applications, “methodically
investigat[ing] how inputs from the various sense modalities interact and interfere” (125).
Chapter 5 takes up the relationship between attention and time, addressing
the length of time/attention certain poems spend on aspects of the landscape.
Koehler describes landscape poetry as experimental in attending to all possible
stimuli. She ascribes to this poetry the psychoanalytic model of “unlimited receptivity” and cognitive science’s theory of “creative cognition,” both of which
“feature a distracted and unfocused phase, which necessarily precedes a flash
of insight” (130). Exemplifying this progression from diffuse to focused attention in landscape poems by Katherine Philips, Finch, Mary Wortley Montagu,
James Ward, and John Dyer, Koehler finds these stages of receptivity most
strongly articulated in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30), noting that
this progression becomes a more familiar and deliberate technique by mid-­
century (158). Continuing her discussion of landscape poetry into chapter 6,
Koehler explains that the stages of receptivity practiced by these earlier poets
become more self-­conscious for later writers who additionally assert a pedagogical role, cultivating receptivity in their readers and drawing comparisons
that invite emulation of the poet’s activities. She argues that the landscape becomes more accessible due to poets’ instructional guidance for readers. This
teacherly quality assumed by poems’ speakers emphasizes the importance of
attending closely, not only to one’s environment, but also to the poem itself, as
Koehler demonstrates through further close readings of Akenside, Thomson,
Thomas and Joseph Warton, and Ann Yearsley. She culminates this analysis
of instructional receptivity in her final chapter, her only chapter entirely devoted to a single author or poem, here focusing on William Cowper’s The Task
(1785). Slowing her analytical pace to reflect that of the poet, she explains that
Cowper acquires receptivity by treading the same terrain many times over and
that he provides advice about where readers should direct voluntary attention.
According to Koehler, Cowper “urges his readers to let go of their automatic behavior” and “to be open to new information and multiple perspectives” (204).
Asserting the centrality of attention in establishing traditional divisions
between eighteenth-­century and Romantic-­era literature, Koehler claims that
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the eighteenth-­century aesthetic endorses the “mutual reinforce[ment]” of attention and imagination while the Romantic model finds these categories incompatible (10). She cites Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles
of Taste (1790), describing a Romantic imagination that possesses no room for
details or “such minutiae as language in a poem or color in a painting,” arguing “that sensory attention is insufficient for experiences of beauty or sublimity” (19, 18). Although Koehler’s reading of Alison’s text is convincing, her
close attention to eighteenth-­century verse sometimes gestures toward a more
complicated continuance of these earlier poetic trends into the verse of major
Romantics, such as Wordsworth, than may be gleaned from this reiteration of
a conventional dichotomy. Indeed, there seems to be a missed opportunity for
highlighting the continuity of attention to minute detail in the scientific poetry
of Romantic-­era writers, including Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Erasmus Darwin,
and Charlotte Smith. Nevertheless, Koehler lays the groundwork for making
these connections and for noticing how eighteenth-­century trends may remain
intact or transform in this succeeding era.
Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century is remarkably timely as literary
critics increasingly find theoretical application for cognitive psychology and
trace the historical and philosophical roots of scientific disciplines within literature. Koehler provides valuable close readings of eighteenth-­century poems
and admirably advocates greater pedagogical awareness of how poets strove
to make their works accessible, as well as of how we might more successfully
convey that accessibility to modern students. Covering subjects ranging from
poetic modes to memory to sensorial experiences to landscape poetry, this book
doubtless will gain the attention of, and be found useful by, an equally broad
range of scholars of eighteenth-­century poetry.
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