Abstract

A vexed claim in the philosophy of poetry is the form-content unity thesis, which states that the formal features of a poem (e.g., meter and rhyme) and its meaning are inseparable. In this paper, I interpret this thesis as a descriptive claim stating that form and content in poetry are experienced as indissolubly connected while reading silently. My view is that the unity of the experience of form and content can be explained by highlighting the role of inner speech (i.e., the mental production of one’s voice) in the phenomenology of reading poetry. The content of the inner voice is heard as having an auditory aspect and a cognitive one, which are indissolubly connected in the phenomenology: they cannot be experienced in isolation from each other (e.g., by attending to a single aspect). This interpretation explains why form-content unity is revelatory of the specific aesthetic value of poetry: it individuates poetry as the art that produces sonic and semantic effects in a unitary way, through the phenomenology of inner speech. Unity captures the specificity of poetry, since comparable sonic and semantic effects are found in other arts (e.g., music and novels).