Beyond Narrative: Poetry, Emotion

and the Perspectival View

Karen Simecek

The view that narrative artworks can offer insights into our lives, in particular, into the nature of
the emotions, has gained increasing popularity in recent years. However, talk of narrative often

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involves reference to a perspective or point of view, which indicates a more fundamental mechanism
at work. In this article, I argue that our understanding of the emotions is incomplete without
adequate attention to the perspectival structures in which they are embedded. Drawing on Bennett
Helm’s theory of emotion, I argue that the narrative view fails to take into account the influence
of perspective on the emotions. In order to address this gap in our understanding of the emotions,
I highlight a mode of engagement with literature that prioritizes the perspectival features of a work.
Focusing on lyric poetry, I argue that non-narrative artworks are those best placed to highlight this
fundamental aspect of our emotional experiences.

1. Introduction
In recent years, there has been an increased interest in narrative and how engaging with
narratives can help us to understand ourselves and our emotional lives.1 For instance,
Alasdair MacIntyre famously argues that we can only understand our actions and those of
others as part of a narrative life.2,3 Peter Goldie also argues for the importance of under-
standing our lives as narratives; he writes, ‘our lives have narrative structure—roughly
speaking, they comprise an unfolding, structured sequence of actions, events, thoughts
and feelings, related from the individual’s point of view’.4 Within debates on the value of
literature, this interest in narrative has resulted in a tendency to focus on narrative fic-
tion, thereby neglecting non-narrative literary works, such as poetry.5 This has led to an
incomplete picture of the potential for literature to offer insights into the emotions.

1 For a good example, see Noël Carroll and John Gibson (eds), Narrative, Emotion and Insight (Pennsylvania, PA: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).
2 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
3 For an excellent critique of MacIntyre’s claims, see Bernard Williams, ‘Life as Narrative’, European Journal
of Philosophy 17 (2009), 305–314. In this paper, Williams alludes to the importance of looking at the
perspectival nature of narrative: ‘We must have a conception of what invites interpretation in these terms’
(ibid., 308). Elisabeth Camp also gestures at the limitations of such narrative understanding of ourselves in her
‘Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self’, Nonesite.org 3 (2011).
4 Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 4.
5 Throughout this article, where I talk of poetry, I intend this to refer to lyric poetry, understood as poetry that
is expressive and relies on the formal features of the work and the effects they produce. Although a lyric poem

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 55 | Number 4 | October 2015 | pp. 497–513 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayv041
© British Society of Aesthetics 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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498 | Karen Simecek

In this article, I argue that by reflecting on our emotional responses to lyric poetry
(which is non-narrative in structure and promotes perspectival engagement), we can
see the potential for art and literature to offer more than an appreciation of narrative
structures as relevant to understanding our emotional lives. In particular, by drawing
on Bennett Helm’s theory of emotion, I will argue that such non-narrative works can
enhance our understanding of the evaluative nature of our emotional responses by mak-
ing clear the influence of perspective.6 Consequently, at the same time as showing the
importance of engaging with works of poetry, I will also show that exclusive focus on
narrative in any discussion of the emotions, as a way of arguing for the value of literature,
is misleading.

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2.  The Narrative View
Most notably, Martha Nussbaum has attempted to build a case for narrative fiction, in par-
ticular the realist novel, as a source of insight into the nature of the emotions.7 Nussbaum
writes, ‘the novel as a form is profoundly committed to the emotions; its interaction with
its readers takes place centrally through them’.8 Drawing a connection between the struc-
ture of a literary work and the structures of our emotions, Nussbaum argues that we can
appreciate how emotions arise by studying literary narratives (and the characters embed-
ded in those narratives), and therefore gain greater understanding of ourselves.9 On her
cognitive view of the emotions, not only do these narratives evoke emotions in the reader,
but they represent forms of emotions themselves. For Nussbaum, this is because emotions
involve evaluative judgements and therefore directly draw on ‘beliefs about how things
are and what’s important’ in the context of one’s life.10
Although Nussbaum does not offer an explicit definition of narrative, we can turn to
Peter Goldie who offers a useful characterization. He writes:
A narrative is a kind of representation of a sequence of events. It is more than just a
bare collection, though; it reveals a certain coherence in what happened, configuring
causal and other connections into a narratable episode or episodes. Episodes can be of

may include elements of narrative, the narrative is not of primary relevance to how we are to understand and
appreciate the work. Our focus is not just on the story, but also on what is expressed. In particular, this focus on
lyric poetry aims to exclude works where there is a clear and dominant narrative structure that is essential to our
appreciation of the work, such as in the case of epic or dramatic poetry.
6 I will not be arguing for a cognitive theory of the emotions but assuming a much less contentious view that
evaluations are part of an emotional experience, allowing for the possibility that emotions are connected in some
way to evaluative judgements.
7 Other examples of this kind of thought include Amy Mullin, ‘Narrative, Emotions, and Autonomy’, in Carroll and
Gibson, Narrative, Emotion and Insight, 92–108 and John Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life (Oxford: OUP, 2007).
8 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: OUP, 1990), 40.
9 Nussbaum develops this idea in Love’s Knowledge.
10 Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 41. For detailed criticism of the cognitive theory of emotion, see Julien A. Deonna
and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2012), 52–62.
 Beyond Narrative | 499

long or short duration, and a narrative can be more or less coherent in the way that
the various episodes hang together.11
Narratives are a particular kind of organization of events, consisting of thoughts, feelings
and actions that are represented as part of a spatio-temporal sequence. We construct nar-
ratives to represent connected individual events, by selecting those episodes that appear
relevant to this organizational structure, which help to form the sense of coherence of
the set of episodes, that is, they can be made sense of from a spatio-temporal perspective.
Nussbaum views the emotions as having narrative structure because, she argues, the emotions
are tied to our personal history.12 In other words, our beliefs and concern for the objects of our
emotions develop through the course of one’s life in the way that they have promoted or harmed

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our wellbeing. This is reflected in the evaluative judgement at the heart of our emotional responses:
Emotions, in short, have a history … new objects of love and anger and fear bear the
traces of earlier objects; one’s emotions toward them are frequently therefore also, in
both intensity and configuration, emotions towards one’s own past.13
The thought is that revealing the structure of our emotional experiences (i.e. what gives
rise to our emotional responses as well as the emotional response itself) will provide
explanation for those emotional experiences.
I will refer to the view that the emotions have narrative structure and that narrative
works of art and literature are best able to provide insight into our emotional lives as ‘the
Narrative View’: this is the view I take Nussbaum to hold. On the Narrative View, the
work’s narrative structure (and character development through the narrative) is priori-
tized over the work’s ‘poetic’ features, such as the use of metaphor, symbolism, rhyme,
rhythm and other aesthetic features of language in understanding and explaining our
emotional responses. On such a view, not only do we come to understand the connection
between narrative and emotion, but also our own emotional responses to the work arise
from our grasp of the narrative structure itself. According to this view, literary narratives
are therefore important because we have an awareness of the (artificial literary) narrative
structure and its relationship to what we experience emotionally.
The claim that narrative is important in understanding our emotional lives seems
plausible. Novels offer us the opportunity to study narratives in relation to an emotional

11 Peter Goldie, ‘Narrative Thinking, Emotion, and Planning’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (2009), 97–106,
at 98. Noël Carroll also emphasizes the causal component of a narrative, see ‘On the Narrative Connection’, in his
Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 118–133. For Carroll, there being a causal relation
between events is what makes a temporal sequence a narrative rather than an annal or chronicle. For criticism of this
focus on cause in narrative, see J. David Velleman, ‘Narrative Explanation’, Philosophical Review 112 (2003), 1–25.
12 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 236.
The idea that the emotions have narrative structure is supported by others, such as Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of
Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Annette Baier, ‘What Emotions Are About’, Philosophical Perspectives 4
(1990), 1–29; Robert Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003); and Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford: OUP, 2012); ‘Narrative Thinking,
Emotion, and Planning’; The Emotions.
13 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 175.
500 | Karen Simecek

response we have to the novel. In addition, novels engage the reader in an emotional activ-
ity that relates to the very emotional responses of the characters contained in the novel.
For example, while reading a novel such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a reader may
respond emotionally to a character’s situation, such as the boy’s fear, and may become
frightened for him. But the reader’s response also relates to the narrative the character
is embedded in—the reader sees the boy’s emotional response as arising from the story
alongside an awareness of their own response. Consequently, this awareness of the rela-
tionship between the narrative and the character’s emotional response enables the reader
to appreciate how their own response relates to the narrative in the work.
This example seems to capture an important experience we can have by engaging with

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novels and other kinds of fictional narratives; but is this the whole story or can literature
perform a broader role than merely engaging us in narratives that inform our emotional
experiences? As we will see, the answer lies in the thought that perspective is more fun-
damental to the emotions than narrative.

3.  The Perspectival View

Discussions of narrative, whether in reference to a work of literature or to the emotions,
often allude to a perspective of some kind. For example, people will talk of narratives
being from a point of view, perspectival, representing or involving an interpretation but
without making clear what this is.14 Such description of narrative indicates that there is a
more basic mechanism at work that deserves closer attention. Therefore, I argue that we
need to look beyond narrative structures in our attempts to gain full understanding of our
emotional lives. Not only do we need an appreciation of a causal, sequential and historical
relation between an object and an emotional response that the narrative view promotes,
we also need to look at the more basic structure of perspective.
By ‘perspective’ I intend to capture something more complex than a mere point of view
(which draws its analogy with a perceptual point of view). What I intend is close to the
notion of perspective developed by Elisabeth Camp. She writes:
[a perspective] organizes [our thoughts on a topic] by imposing a complex structure
of relative prominence on them, so that some features stick out in our minds while
others fade into the background, and by making some features especially central to
explaining others. A perspective often also imposes certain evaluative attitudes and
emotional valences on its constituent features. Finally, a perspective doesn’t just pres-
ent us with a complex thought, to the effect that a host of basic-level features are
related in a higher-order structure. Rather, it gives us a tool for thinking. Being a

14 This point is acknowledged by Goldie: ‘Narratives can involve internal and external perspectives or points of view
... the external perspective is always there, in spite of sometimes seeming evanescent, always shaping and
colouring the narrative and indicating the narrator’s own evaluation and emotional response to what happened’
(‘Narrative, Emotion, and Perspective’, in Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes (eds), Imagination, Philosophy, and
the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), 55–69, at 55–56). See also his The Mess Inside, where he makes clear the role
of perspective in forming narratives.
 Beyond Narrative | 501

‘tool for thought’ means at least two things here. First, a perspective helps us to do
things with the thoughts we have: to make quick judgements based on what’s most
important, to grasp intuitive connections, and to respond emotionally, among other
things. And second, it provides us with a ‘way to go on’, incorporating new thoughts
about the focal topic and often about related topics as well.15
A perspective captures a particular complex orientation (a general evaluative attitude)
towards experience, which acts as a ‘tool for thinking’, since such an orientation will
govern how we go about making sense of our experience as well as directing the thoughts
and feelings we have in response to what we experience. Such a perspective will be shaped
by (i) our location in space and time (and the information we have access to); (ii) what

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we believe the world is like; (iii) what we (personally) value; and (iv) what we take to be
significant (in terms of what we are disposed to take as significant given our values and
beliefs). Perspective affects what we will attend to, the connections we will make and
how we will organize our thoughts in order to make sense of our experience.16 We should
therefore think of a person’s perspective as a set of implicit beliefs, commitments and val-
ues, and thus determining not only what information becomes the focus of our thinking,
i.e. what we will bring to the fore, but how we will organize that information in bringing
those features to the fore.17

4.  Non-Narrative Literature

In order to motivate my claim that poetry is essentially perspectival, I will draw on the
experience of reading the poem ‘The Butterfly Farm’. This poem does not have a narrative
structure, instead, it is structured around bringing together two images (i.e. representa-
tions): a butterfly farm and women in Japanese tea houses.
The Butterfly Farm18
The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead:
Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash,
Its passion for water to uncloud.

15 Elisabeth Camp, ‘Two Varieties of Literary Imagination: Metaphor, Fiction, and Thought Experiments’, Midwest
Studies in Philosophy 33 (2009), 107–130, at 111.
16 For a similar notion of a perspective, see A. W. Moore, Points of View (Oxford: OUP, 1997), 4–6. Focusing
on the nature of our imaginative engagement with fiction, Elisabeth Camp relates the notion of perspective to
‘seeing-as’, which captures how we imagine certain content as well as what that content is. Camp, ‘Two Varieties
of Literary Imagination’). For further discussion about the notion of perspective and its importance in shaping
understanding, see also Elisabeth Camp, ‘Slurring Perspectives’, Analytic Philosophy 54 (2013), 330–349.
17 The notion of perspective I am developing here is influenced by Bennett W. Helm’s notion of an evaluative
perspective (Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation, and the Nature of Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007)), which forms a pattern of background values of the individual, those things a person is committed
to holding as significant.
18 Medbh McGuckian, ‘The Butterfly Farm’, in The Flower Master (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1982). This poem is
reprinted with kind permission from the publisher, The Gallery Press.
502 | Karen Simecek

In the Japanese tea house they believe

In making the most of the bright nights:
That the front of a leaf is male, the back female.
There are grass stains on their white stockings;
In artificial sun even the sound are disposable;
The mosaic of their wings is spun from blood.
Cyanide in the killing jar relaxes the Indian moon moth,
The pearl-bordered beauty, the clouded yellow,
The painted lady, the silver-washed blue.

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Poet and literary critic, Ruth Padel points out that the use of metaphor in ‘The Butterfly
Farm’ brings together the idea of a butterfly farm, which exploits butterflies for their
beauty—where they are killed and preserved—with the idea of the treatment of women
in society as represented in the Japanese tea house.19 This juxtaposition of images helps
us to come to see the moral significance of exploiting beauty in our society. We come to
see the dangers of attending to superficial beauty at the cost of the very thing we admire
and value.
By engaging us in the image of the butterflies—their beauty set against the language of
destruction (‘death’, ‘silence’, ‘disposable’, ‘cyanide’)—we become emotionally primed in
how we relate this to the role of women in the tea houses. Take, for instance, the turn in
feeling of the first line: ‘The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead’. The use of the word
‘film’ suggests something delicate, fragile and the word ‘butterfly’ suggests something
colourful and beautiful, yet the line ends with the word ‘dead’, which has such a definite
and ugly sound. This causes a feeling of loss of beauty and a loss of something of value. This
sentiment is reinforced in line three, which follows the same pattern of feeling: ‘Its pas-
sion for water to uncloud.’ We therefore become emotionally primed through the way the
poem brings certain features to the centre of our attention, which enables us to see beyond
the superficial beauty of the images and to see that something of value is threatened.
The union of the image of the butterfly farm and the role of women in the Japanese
tea house is not easy. The reader has to think carefully about how the use of language
and the formal features work together in the poem in order to let connections between
the images emerge. The images fuse together in the third stanza, which leaves us unsure
whether we are talking about butterflies or the women. This helps us to think of the value
of these women as individual human beings and not mere objects. Just as we feel loss at
the death of the butterflies, we come to feel a sense of loss in the artificial treatment of
women. Drawing these connections makes us sensitive to the standards we are endorsing
in thinking of women in this way (as geishas). We are in effect treating them in the same
way as the farmed butterflies, merely appreciating superficial beauty whilst neglecting
their more significant value as living things.
As ‘The Butterfly Farm’ demonstrates, poetry does not always present us with a set of
connected episodes, in a linear, causal sequence. Instead, poetry presents us with images,

19 Ruth Padel, 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 95–97.
 Beyond Narrative | 503

ideas, concepts, which connect in such a way that makes the experience of the whole
poem meaningful with a deep sense of significance.20 This shows that the perspective can
come apart from a narrative structure. A perspective does not need a narrative structure
to sustain it, but a narrative structure always requires a perspective.
In order to understand a poem, we must work out what the perspective on offer is.
This does not just involve working out what the focus is on but how we ought to focus on
the subject, which involves attending to the formal features of the work in conjunction
with the words, images, associations, etc. The perspective offered in the poem is what
binds and organizes the different aspects of the poem, which helps us to forge a network
of coherent and consistent connections across the whole poem. The themes of the poem

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emerge from these connections.
Here I want to draw on some ideas from Troy Jollimore, in order to tease out some
important points relating to the perspectival nature of the poem. Although he predomi-
nantly focuses on metaphor, I take Jollimore’s view not only to capture something about
the nature of figurative language but also to tap into an important feature of our experi-
ence of poetry more broadly.21 Jollimore argues that, insofar as we see metaphor as offer-
ing a complex representation, metaphor can be understood as perspectival: ‘We are asked
to view one thing in a way that is guided or informed by our awareness and experience
of something else.’22 We can see this at work in the poem, where we are asked to make
connections between the farmed butterflies and women in Japanese tea houses as complex
representations, and not just one aspect of these images. As Jollimore argues: ‘Figurative
language ... works in much the same way as do pictures and other visual representations:
In both cases, the cognitive content they embody tends largely to shape our holistic appre-
hension of situations as a whole, rather than our atomistic perceptions of their constituent
elements considered in isolation.’23
For Jollimore, ‘perspective’ should be thought of as a kind of filter following Max Black’s
view of metaphor.24,25 This relates to Camp’s notion of perspective, since Black, in addition
to thinking of metaphorical uses of language as a filter, also emphasizes the way in which
metaphors organize our thoughts on a particular topic. Using the example of calling a man
‘wolf’, Black argues that such a metaphor ‘suppresses some details, emphasizes others—in

20 The other poems in Padel’s anthology demonstrate that this non-narrative structure is common to a great deal
of contemporary poetry; ‘The Butterfly Farm’ is not atypical. For example, see Helen Dunmore’s ‘The Surgeon
Husband’ (which juxtaposes images of preparing salmon and performing surgery), Paul Muldoon’s ‘Quoof’
(which brings together private language and private sexuality), or Selima Hill’s ‘The World’s Entire Wasp
Population’ (which centres on a particular feeling).
21 It is important to note that I am not suggesting that a theory of metaphor will serve well as a theory of poetry, but
there are a number of important connections, in particular the relationship between images and how that impacts
our understanding.
22 Troy Jollimore, ‘“Like a Picture or a Bump on the Head”: Vision, Cognition, and the Language of Poetry’,
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (2009), 131–158, at 146. Richard Moran also views metaphor as inherently
perspectival (‘Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force’, Critical Inquiry 16 (1989), 87–112).
23 Jollimore, ‘Like a Picture or a Bump on the Head’, 132.
24 Ibid., 144.
25 Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954–1955), 273–294.
504 | Karen Simecek

short, organizes our view of man’.26 Developing this thought, Jollimore argues that it is
through such a filter that we may be able to come to see things that are ordinarily hidden
or at least, partially hidden. This is because the perspectival character of metaphor can help
show something as significant by bringing some elements to the centre of our awareness
(that we would not normally attend to) and leaving others at the periphery. The metaphor
offers up a particular organizational framework, which imparts a way of making sense of the
thoughts and feelings that emerge from our focus on certain features as significant in relation
to other features of the image.
When we read the poem, we are invited to see this significance in the perspective of the
poem (those things presented as the focus of attention) but through our own perspective (with

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our own sense of what ought to be the focus of our attention). This enables us to build per-
spectives through the process of accommodating other perspectives (on offer in the poem). By
negotiating what is brought into our frame of awareness by the poem with our own evaluation
of what ought to be the focus of our attention, given such a framework, we can develop our
own perspectives and sense of significance by appreciating the structure of the poem:
Perception is inherently perspectival. So is understanding. But perspectives can build on
perspectives, and understandings on understandings. This—the furthering and deepen-
ing of our cognitive grasp of the world, not only through the accumulation of true facts
but through the proliferation of understandings—is what, for us, constitutes progress.27
Such development of understanding necessarily involves both cognitive and affective
grasp, as Neil Cooper argues:
Understanding anything involves appreciating and appraising significance. In the field
of human action this aspect of standard understanding is more conspicuous, for what
we experience as significance is often determined by the emotions we feel.28
It is important that when engaging with the perspective of the poem that we do not do so
passively, that is, merely seeing how the thoughts, feelings, etc. come together. We must
actively appreciate this perspective through our own emotional responses, which either
(at least in part) support or conflict with the perspective embodied in the work and result
in greater understanding.

5.  Moving Beyond Narrative

So far I have outlined how poetry should be understood as perspectival. I now want to
make clearer why we should think of the emotions as essentially involving perspective
(as conceptually prior to narrative) and how the perspectival nature of poetry can reveal
this feature of our emotional experiences. My claim is that by reflecting on our emo-
tional responses to poetry (particularly where there is a lack of narrative), we can explore
the nature of the emotions as arising in response to the perspective of the work. The

26 Black, ‘Metaphor’, 288.

27 Jollimore, ‘Like a Picture or a Bump on the Head’, 158.
28 Neil Cooper, ‘Understanding People’, Philosophy 75 (2000), 383–400, at 385.
 Beyond Narrative | 505

important feature of our experience of reading a poem is its ability to explore the nature
of the perspectives that underwrite certain emotional responses, that is, how a particular
organization of information can give rise to a particular emotional response.29
The experience of reading a poem can isolate elements of our perspectives (what we
believe, value, find important), in part by showing emotions emerging in contexts that
highlight just those elements without needing a narrative structure. The activity of engag-
ing emotionally with poetry can help us to explore the nature of the evaluative aspect
at the heart of our emotional experiences. Through our engagement with poetry, we
can come to see how these evaluative thoughts arise and how they are embedded in our
experiences.

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According to Helm, an emotion is an evaluative feeling (‘felt evaluation’),30 which is
rationally connected to other emotions, desires and evaluative judgements (but does not
directly involve an evaluative judgement). In responding emotionally, we feel something as
having import or significance, that is, as something worthy of our attention and action.31
Emotions are intentional and have hedonic valence, i.e. we have ‘pleasant or painful
responses to import as an intentional object that impresses itself on us in having the emo-
tion’.32 For Helm, there are three aspects to feeling an emotion (e.g. fear): the formal object
(e.g. dangerousness—this is what characterizes the kind of emotion it is), the target (e.g.
the thing I evaluate as dangerous) and the focus (which explains my evaluation because, for
example, it threatens something I care about).33 He writes:
In feeling fear, the badness of the threat is thrust upon you, grabbing your attention and
moving you—literally—to respond, and this feeling of the badness of the threat just
is your being pained by the danger it presents. In general, in having an emotion we feel
good or bad, we are pleased or pained, not in that we have some special, non-intentional
bodily sensation but rather in that we are gripped by the import of our circumstances.34
Emotions are responses that frame the target in relation to the background object (the
focus of my emotion) in a particular way that brings to my attention something I care
about. What I care about connects with my general values, how I see myself in the world
and what is at stake for me in these circumstances. As Jenefer Robinson writes, ‘emotions
are ways of focusing our attention on those things that are important to our wants, goals,
and interests’.35

29 There are a number of theories of emotion which build in something like a perspective, for instance Robert Roberts
argues that emotions should be thought of as concern-based construals, which relates to the Wittgensteinian notion
of ‘seeing-as’ (Roberts, Emotions). Bennett Helm has a strongly perspectival account of the emotions, invoking the
notion of felt evaluations, and so I will be using his theory to develop my view in relation to poetry.
30 Helm, Emotional Reason, 34. For a good sympathetic discussion of Helm’s view see Jan Slaby, ‘Emotional
Rationality and Feelings of Being’, in Joerg Fingerhut and Sabine Marienberg (eds), Feelings of Being Alive (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2012), 55–78.
31 Helm, Emotional Reason, 71.
32 Ibid., 35.
33 Ibid., 69.
34 Helm, ‘Emotions as Evaluative Feelings’, Emotions Review 1 (2009), 248–255, at 253.
35 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 126.
506 | Karen Simecek

Helm argues that ‘something’s having import is intelligible only in light of a sub-
ject’s evaluative perspective’,36 which is shaped by a broad pattern of emotions and
judgements, rather than by any single emotional response or evaluative judgement. This
relates to my account of perspective as shaped by a set of background (or implicitly held)
beliefs, values and commitments: ‘a person normally has a single evaluative perspec-
tive instituted by the commitments he makes to import, both explicitly in evaluative
judgement and implicitly in his felt evaluations’.37 When I explicitly judge something as
something I care about, it carries normative force, therefore it will only be something
I care about if I respond emotionally in a way that is consistent with this judgement.
A single evaluative perspective therefore requires coherence between our judgements

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and emotions, in order to hold that set of things as things about which I care.
Through our felt evaluations we can gain awareness of our commitment to import
because in responding emotionally we see the object of our focus as a candidate worthy of
our attention and action. This awareness does not necessarily give us knowledge of value
but self-knowledge of our own (personal) values—our emotions reflect what import we
(implicitly) take objects to have (i.e. whether they are worthy of attention), which we may
then evaluate according to whether it coheres with our perspective, that is, with our pat-
tern of felt evaluations and evaluative judgements.
Let us now turn to another poetic example, which will help to show how the poem
reveals the role of perspective in our emotional responses and also where the perspectival
and the narrative views come apart.

  The Florist’s at Midnight38

   Stems bleed into water

   loosening their sugars
    into the dark,

   clouding dank water

    stood in zinc buckets
     at the back of the shop.

   All night the chill air

    is humid with breath.
    Pools of mist

   from the dark mouths

   of blooms,
    from the agape

36 Helm, Emotional Reason, 51.

37 Ibid., 159.
38 Sarah Maguire, ‘The Florist’s at Midnight’, in her The Florist’s at Midnight (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). This
poem is reprinted with kind permission of the author.
 Beyond Narrative | 507

   of the last arum lily—

    as a snow-white wax shawl
    curls round its throat

   cloaking the slim yellow tongue,

    with its promise of pollen
    solitary, alert

  packed buckets
    of tulips, of lilies, of dahlias

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     spill down from tiered shelving

   nailed to the wall.

   Lifted at dawn
     torn up from their roots

   then cloistered in cellophane,

    they are cargoed across continents
     to fade far from home.

   How still they are

    now everyone has gone,
    rain printing the tarmac

  the streetlights
   in pieces
    on the floor.

In this poem, there is a neatness and care expressed by the division of the stanzas on the
page. When we see these words laid on the page, we recognize that this is something that
has been crafted. The lack of words on the page (which almost seem like petals falling ‘in
pieces on the floor’) communicates visually that this poem is composed of compressed and
condensed language.
The space created on the page has a dramatic effect; it represents silence in which
the reader can reflect and helps intensify the experience. Every word is visually equally
weighted and so we take it that they are of equal importance to our reading experience.
The white space that surrounds the words represents the silence experienced on hear-
ing the poem. The words break the silence, which leaves us—the readers—exposed to
the violent language of the poem. The white space encourages us to focus on the images
intensely, and therefore the violent language strikes the reader as shocking. The short
stanza and line lengths act to slow down the description of the florist’s shop. This ‘slowing
down’ highlights the distinct images in the poem, which encourages us to dwell on the
images thereby enabling the reader to see the poem’s particular organizational framework
as impressing on them.
508 | Karen Simecek

The poem presents two distinct kinds of images: the flowers and the human body.
This suggests a connection between flowers and human beings, an idea which may evoke
certain thoughts, feelings, memories and associations. We then consider this connection
alongside the particular way the flowers are described. We leave aside some of those
thoughts, feelings, memories and associations that were evoked in the first instance in
order to accommodate the new thoughts, feelings, memories, and associations evoked.
The process of assimilating these elements helps to shift our perspective because it re-
prioritizes certain thoughts, feelings, memories, associations and emotions in our experi-
ence, i.e. the structure of the poem directs the reader in the ‘way to go on’ in organizing
their thoughts and feelings that arise in their experience of reading the poem.

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For instance, our emotional response is called for in the first line of the poem with the
image of stems bleeding into water. The word ‘bleed’ calls for such response because of
its strong association with pain, danger, loss and death. This resonates throughout the
poem, such as in the next stanza where we are presented with the image of ‘clouding
dank water’, where we consider this not merely as clouded by the lost sugars of the flow-
ers but simultaneously as bloodied water. The images are suggested in different ways: the
sugared, merely cloudy water is evoked directly by the description, whereas the bloodied
water comes imaginatively, by considering the image in relation to the experience of the
first stanza and the emotive force of the word ‘bleed’. The affective aspects of the poem
draw our attention to words that call for an emotional response: the affective aspects of
the poem are able to emotionally prime the reader, or suggest an appropriate emotional
response (in the sense that it makes sense in the context of the poem). We can think of
this as providing us with a felt evaluation, which we then need to judge rationally in terms
of whether we personally want to take up the attitude of import that the poem suggests.
Furthermore, consider the lines ‘All night the chill air/is humid with breath’ (7‒8). We
view this image in a particular way because of the emotional tone set by the word ‘bleed’.
Instead of focusing on the warmth of the humid breath, we focus on the contrast itself between
the warm humid breath and the cold chill air because of our expectations of pain, danger,
loss and death evoked by ‘bleed’. This not only brings to mind the flowers’ fight to stay alive,
which we understand in terms of contrasts but also reinforces a connection to humanity; we
do not normally think of flowers bleeding when we cut their stems, or breathing with dark
mouths. This suggests something beyond the subject and something emotionally relevant to us
as human beings and helps to begin the process of making the evaluation explicit in judgement.
Our response becomes confused on first reading as we move from the darkness of the
florist’s shop to the exotic brilliance of the ‘last arum lily’ with its shawl to protect its
chance to reproduce. Such confusion calls on the readers to make sense of this by drawing
on their own perspective. This demonstrates the complexity of our emotional responses
because we can see how different emotional responses can pull us in different directions
and how this triggers a process of re-evaluation. As a result, we can still appreciate the
beauty of the lily even whilst considering its tragedy. By presenting us with such an image,
we become aware of what is at stake in the poem because the isolation and fading of the
flowers overwhelms the fleeting focus on their beauty.
The sense of loss we get from the image of the stems bleeding and the inevitable failure
of the arum lily to pollinate is compounded in the final two stanzas where there is no
 Beyond Narrative | 509

reference to the flowers; they have disappeared from the poem. All we are left with are
the urban images of the dark of the tarmac and the streetlights—and even they are not
left undamaged, ‘in pieces/on the floor’ (32–33).
Although I have focused so far on forging connections as we read, the emergence of themes is
not a product of a linear engagement, but of how connections are forged across the whole expe-
rience itself. The poem gets the reader to move back and forth between their ideas and feelings
about people and about flowers. This is achieved by mixing human images into the description
of the flowers and focusing on aspects of the flowers that connect with human concerns, such
as a desire to reproduce. The consequence of such shifting between domains is that we do not
think about the flowers in the poem as we would ordinarily think of flowers in a florist’s shop.

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For instance, we do not dwell on the ordinary beauty of the flowers and see them as transient
luxuries, but we see them in a new light: we see their fragility in terms of their life cycle and
flourishing as a species (in relation to the individual blooms), which is brought out through the
language of fragility. In this way, we can see how the perspective of the poem impresses upon us.
In trying to make sense of our emotional responses to elements in the poem, we con-
sider possible linkages and reflect on how we have organized our responses to the poem.
For instance, we come to see that violence done to commercial flowers connects well to
violence experienced by uprooted people. We are able to make this connection because
of the peculiar perspective the poem takes, by combining the flower imagery and human
vocabulary, and by bringing an apparently ‘inert’ scene to life. This helps us to see the sub-
ject of the poem, the flowers in the florists, as representative of anyone who has been forced
to leave their home: ‘lifted at dawn/torn up from their roots’ (23–24), thereby connecting
these felt evaluations with explicit evaluative judgements in our project of making sense of
the work. Through the experience of the poem as a complex whole, the reader discovers
that she can connect her feelings toward these apparently unrelated domains. This is in the
same way that the reader makes emotional as well as intellectual connections between the
two domains of butterfly farms and women in Japanese tea houses in ‘The Butterfly Farm’.
The poem’s perspective shapes the reader’s experience, which brings the reader’s own
perspectives to bear. The connections we forge appear to be perspectival in nature because
we do not connect all possible associations in the poem with one another, but only those
that contribute to a heightened sense of coherence and consistency in the poem. These
connections help the emergence of themes. We see the flowers as something that has
value, yet they are in danger. This perspective of the poem, which is focused on the flow-
ers—their value and fragility—and their relationship to the human domain, prompts the
reader to make connections between these two images. As a result, we respond intellec-
tually and emotionally to these connections in considering the relevant thematic concepts.
If the narrative view is correct, then narrative must form an important part of our
emotional understanding of the poem (since it must ‘represent that history of the emotion
and enter into it’39), but it is not obvious that there is a fully developed narrative here.40

39 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 236.

40 Even if one is able to detect a kind of minimal (or incomplete) narrative in the poem, all we have is a narrative
embedded in a non-narrative poem. This is far from a developed narrative of the sort needed for emotional
understanding according to the narrative view.
510 | Karen Simecek

A narrative requires a particular kind of structuring, a developmental or causal connection

between two or more events, yet in the poem we are not offered any kind of progression;
we end where we start, looking through the window of a florist’s shop. The emotions of
the reader emerge from a development of a set of beliefs, values and concerns that we bring
to the images of the flowers, which we use as a tool for making sense of what we are pre-
sented with in the poem. As we read and respond to the formal features of the poem, we
connect the images of the flowers to ideas of people. This process of forging connections
has the effect of shifting our perspective to include values that are at stake for humans as
represented by the flowers.
Our emotional engagement with the poem involves a complex network of connec-

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tions and associations, rather than, necessarily, a narrative. The emotional response
arises from particular connections we make and these must be evaluative in some way,
since we must judge them to be contributing to the meaning of the poem. Meaning-
making is evaluative and the emotions can help guide us in making these evaluations in
the process of making sense of something. Emotions are not simple responses to objects
in the world; they are complex. Poetry expresses its themes in much the same way, as
complex aspects of a poem bound up in the experience of reading and responding to it,
which emerge from the particular way the poem is organized and the interconnections
it promotes.
This seems to pose a problem for the narrative view. Its main failure is to account for
the reader’s emotional engagement with a poem, because we do not engage with the work
as a sequence of events but as an interconnected, organized network. Our emotional
responses to the poem emerge due to the process of forging connections supported at both
an affective and a cognitive level. This process involves making decisions on what forms
part of the interpretation. For instance, I prioritize the arum lily and the idea that it is
making itself ready to pollinate, even though it will not be able to do so—this seems to
be a key part of making sense of the poem as a whole. I could have chosen to think about
florist shops generally, focusing on the things they make, the kinds of occasions to which
these flowers may contribute. In part, my decisions are guided by a perspective that is on
offer in the poem, i.e. the fact that the poem carefully describes the arum lily and pivots
on this image, which my understanding of the poem needs to capture. Ultimately, my
decisions involve bringing my own (evaluative) perspective to the interpretation of the
poem in order to appreciate the need to reproduce and exist.

6.  Rethinking the Narrative View

However, one might insist that engaging with poetry may require the reader to construct narra-
tive/narratives that are implicit in the work in order fully to understand the poem’s content. For
instance, I may construct a narrative to tell the story of the flowers plucked from their ‘home’
where they cannot flourish. But does that mean such narratives form part of the structure of
my emotional experience? Narrative may be a useful tool in helping to organize the thoughts
and images in the poem, but such an organization does not fully acknowledge the way the poem
presents the formal features in relation to the images, thoughts and feelings expressed. We
respond more immediately to these aesthetic features and only later connect them to what we
 Beyond Narrative | 511

are engaging with imaginatively. For instance, a narrative structure cannot capture the role of the
connection between the use of emotive words (‘bleed’) and the white space, which we respond
to immediately in addition to appreciating their wider significance. These features do not merely
occur within the imaginative space of the poem (e.g. the florist’s shop that we are imagining),
they impact on how we receive the words of the poem, before we have entered into imaginative
engagement with the work. The narrative merely provides one of a number of different pos-
sible complex organizational structures, but, crucially, such a way of organizing our thoughts in
response to the poem fails to capture the importance of the affective aspects of the poem.
There is value in attending to narratives, but only in the same way that rhythm, rhyme
and other formal features play an important role in the reading experience. We should

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therefore see the role of narrative as a structural device and nothing more. Peter Lamarque
takes a similar view, arguing that we must be careful not to make the leap from thinking
such a device has value in the work to thinking it has wider value:
The great literary works—epic poems and novels—are of immense interest and
their narrative structures, plots, and characters reward detailed study. But, arguably,
it is not the fact that these works are narratives that gives them interest, rather the
fact that they are literary narratives.41
Following Lamarque, I am also drawing attention to the literary quality of the narratives.
Literary narratives are not flat stories but consist of characters, events, metaphors and
other literary devices, which produce emotionally and imaginatively rich experiences for
the reader. As Gregory Currie argues,
with [literary] narratives … we expect rich but bounded relations of consequence
between items within the corpus, partly to keep the quantity of information manage-
able, but also because we are looking for thematic unity, and long chains of conse-
quence threaten to take us away from our theme.42
Literary narratives contribute to the presentation of the work, but are not necessarily what
shapes our emotional response to the work (although they may be part of what is responded to).
It seems that our emotional responses must be driven by factors that come prior to
having grasped the narrative content in reading poetry. In fact, it seems that our emo-
tional responses can help us to appreciate the narrative content rather than vice versa.
The crucial turning points and significant links in a narrative—the things that prompt
emotion—have to involve things we care about. These elements of our perspectives have
to be at work to explain how narrative events have more significance than satisfying nar-
rative curiosity (what happens next, what causes what); they must be organized to reveal
significance, which is determined by our evaluative perspective. A narrative cannot reveal
this significance independently of such a perspective.
Although a story might be a way of organizing and representing some set of ideas or themes, it
is not the story that is of interest but what and how it represents; we respond emotionally to other

41 Peter Lamarque, ‘On Not Expecting Too Much From Narrative’, Mind and Language 19 (2004), 393–408, at 393,
my emphasis.
42 Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: OUP, 2010), 8–9.
512 | Karen Simecek

formal features of the work in addition to any narrative present. We are responding to the poem
as an organized whole, as something to engage emotionally with, which includes the images and
aesthetics of language and is not conducted merely in an imaginative space within a story (in the
sense that we respond emotionally to imagining characters in a structured sequence of events).
By attending to how our interaction with the perspective of the poem can affect our
interpretation, we can come to appreciate the role of perspective in our understanding.
In relation to the emotions, this is important because it can help us to understand why we
respond emotionally in the way we do by revealing aspects of our evaluative perspectives.
Forging connections in a coherent and consistent way is necessary to get to an inter-
pretation of a poem. If we merely forge connections without coherence and consistency,

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we are no closer to reaching a sense of what binds the poem together and are no closer
to understanding it. Coherence and consistency strengthens the relationship between the
interpretation and the experience of reading the poem, and in turn connects felt evalu-
ations (both our own and those constructed by the poem) with evaluative judgements.
Of course, we would not want to say that the emotions are always coherent and consistent,
since we are clearly capable of having unwarranted emotional responses. Poetry shows us
how it can be coherent and consistent as part of an organizational framework, even though
objectively it may not be well supported. Coherence and consistency are important to our
emotional understanding, because they deepen our emotional relationships by integrating
the background object of our emotion with our worldview (i.e. our evaluative perspective).
We must always at least be responding emotionally from some perspective with some
set of commitments, values and concerns, but we can interpret life differently depending
on the perspective adopted (i.e. which particular set of commitments, values and con-
cerns we bring to our experience). By engaging with poetry, we develop our capacity to
forge connections, which will ultimately allow us to shift perspectives and fine-tune our
emotional responses by building perspectives.
In coming to understand our emotional responses to the poem, we come closer to
seeing what matters to us, because trying to make sense of the poem as a coherent and
consistent whole will involve attempting to articulate and make sense of our emotional
responses in the context of the experience of the poem. This articulation will involve rec-
ognizing the implicit judgements we are making, thereby connecting our felt evaluations
with explicit evaluative judgements. Charles Taylor recognizes that our emotions require
reference to judgements in order to try to articulate them:
Many of our feelings, emotions, desires, in short much of our experienced motiva-
tion, are such that saying properly what they are like involves expressing or making
explicit a judgement about the object they bear on.43
In feeling loss in reading a poem, I feel that emotion towards something. The object (or
experience) matters in understanding the emotional response because my emotional
response arises from my interpretation and evaluation of the poem (or aspects of the poem).
Engagement with poetic language is better placed to help us to articulate our felt evalu-
ations and reveal import rather than actually having the experience that is depicted in the

43 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47.
 Beyond Narrative | 513

poem. This is because the poem offers a perspectively structured experience that tests the
limits of our grasp of meaning and its significance for us. For instance, in the example of
‘The Florist’s at Midnight’, our encounter with the language of the poem—with the words
and our responses to them—leads us to make sense of our emotional response in connection
with uprooted people, that is, the way the poem presents this as significant. We can only see
that there is value or significance for us if we have made sense of some action or experience,
which involves describing. The language of the poem helps to express the loss of value in
uprooting and this articulation helps us to get clearer about our own feelings. This is because
of the negative relationship between our perspective and that of the presentation of the flow-
ers: ‘Language articulates our feelings, makes them clearer and more defined; and in this way

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transforms our sense of the imports involved; and hence transforms the feeling.’44

7. Conclusion
We have seen good reason to look beyond a narrative view of the role of literature in giv-
ing insight into the nature of the emotions in favour of a perspectival view, which takes
perspective as conceptually prior to narrative. We have also seen reason to attend to the
perspectival nature of the emotions as separate from any narrative structure they may
have in order to appreciate fully the nature of the emotions.
The important feature that emerged from the discussion of both ‘The Florist’s at
Midnight’ and ‘The Butterfly Farm’ was how a poem presents the reader with a particu-
lar organization of thoughts, feelings and sense of significance—the perspective of the
work—that the reader needs to make sense of from their own perspective. Poetry can
help us to understand the nature and structure of the emotions by exploring the nature of
perspective itself; it enriches our emotional lives by allowing us to explore how our emo-
tions arise from the particular perspective we have. From this experience, we gain a sense
of how we focus and forge connections and how this affects our worldview.
Despite casting doubt on the narrative view as applied to poetry, I have shown that our emo-
tional engagement with poetry has real value. As well as helping us to have a richer experience
when reading, our emotional engagement also presents us with the opportunity to explore
different perspectives and gain an appreciation of what is involved in our emotional processes
more generally. This experience provides an opportunity to build perspectives, examine the
perspectival structures that shape our emotional responses and fine-tune our own perspec-
tives through a back and forth between our felt evaluations and evaluative judgements.45

Karen Simecek
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick
k.d.simecek@warwick.ac.uk

44 Ibid., 65.
45 I would like to thank Eileen John, Anna Christina Soy Ribeiro, Katy Thomas, Rafe McGregor and audiences at
the European Society for Aesthetics Conference (Dublin, 2015) and the European Philosophical Society for the
Study of Emotions Conference (Edinburgh, 2015) for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful
for the immensely useful suggestions from two anonymous reviews of this journal.