Kendall Walton proposes that poetry is a form of ‘thoughtwriting’. Thoughtwriting is a form of writing that is made to be appropriated by its reader, so they can take on the words in the text as if they are their own thoughts. He argues that poetry is particularly conducive to being works of thoughtwriting. Using examples of contemporary poetry, particularly Sinéad Morrisey's Genetics and Rosaria Giuranna's Haiku - a LIS poem ('LIS' referring to Italian Sign Language), I consider the features distinctive of poetry that make it apt for providing us with thoughts. Initially, we could argue that poetry does seem particularly apt for providing us with thoughts, especially phenomenal or non-cognitive thoughts (such as emotions, attitudes, and experiences) that would otherwise be inexpressible. This conduciveness to provide us with non-cognitive thoughts is significant in instances of resistance poetry, which attempts to capture the circumstances or experiences of an oppressed group of people. However, I argue that this could point to an issue in understanding poetry as thoughtwriting, as this suggests that some poems are made to be deliberately inaccessible to certain audiences. If this is the case, then audience accessibility is significant in determining the semantic content of the poem, but understanding poetry as 'thoughtwriting' cannot account audience-relativity as a semantically relevant feature of poetry.
Scarlett Willis (Tue,) studied this question.