Unlike prose, poetry gets incomparably less critical treatment in empathy-oriented readings. While the majority of theoreticians of empathy conclude that only certain aspects of another’s mental and emotional frame can be captured in literature and then »empathically re-enacted«f by the reader ( Stueber 2006, 21), the general urge is to regard characters as (transient and situated) psychological wholes that the reader needs to uncover in the process of perusal. The ample representation of the empathic mode of reading in those studies centers on prose, assuming that characters embody mental states with which readers may empathize with various degrees of accuracy. Those have recently been followed by a number of volumes focused on theories of empathy, particularly Heidi Maibom’s Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (2017) and Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie’s Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (2011), both of which devote a lot of space to the literary and aesthetic considerations of what it means to empathize with another. Theories of empathy have increasingly been making inroads into the field of literary study, with the landmark monographs such as Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel (2007) and Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction (2006) both appearing in the first decade of the twenty first century, followed by Rethinking Empathy through Literature (2014), a collection of essays edited by Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. This tension may manifest itself in how form and content challenge each other or how they cooperate, which in either case leaves us with a rather uncomfortable feeling of having witnessed not a representation of but an embodied, real-time moment of intimate and essentially aporetic experiential performance.

Thus, a tentative conclusion is that lyric poetry’s formal complexity and its non-mimetic nature enter into a dynamic relationship with the propositional content – a dynamic which contributes to the continual disorientation of our empathic capacity that is the essential form of our performance of the poetic text. In the last section of the present essay, I analyze three poems, »Punishment« by Seamus Heaney, »The Loaf« by Paul Muldoon and »Geis« by Caitríona O’Reilly, in order to show how the empathic impulse is both triggered and disoriented by the tensions between the poems’ denotative meanings and their formal features, mainly prosody and rhyme scheme. This dialectic of empathy and disorientation is a dynamic process that can take various forms.

As a result, the reader is perpetually made to feel into the speaker’s evocations of mental states but his or her empathic efforts are thwarted by the operations of the text in which a given affect is being evoked and disarticulated at the same time. By contrast, in lyric poetry, empathy is both necessitated and simultaneously disoriented through the discontinuous, open-ended nature of the poetic text. This is shown in the analysis of the work of such critics as Suzanne Keen and Liza Zunshine. I then move on to complement this distinction between poetry and prose by noting the fact that critics who explore how empathy is employed in reading fiction appear to depart from assumptions of comprehensibility and stability of the representations of characters’ mental states. This positioning, in turn, creates a situation in which the text, rather than representing a mental state, embodies it and in the process of being enacted impels the reader to internalize this state. However, unlike in prose, where the reader is allowed to empathize with the characters via the mediation of the narrator, in poetry, as Jonathan Culler and a number of other theoreticians of the lyric have indicated, the reader assumes the position of the speaker, thus becoming a reperformer of the text. In the present essay, I argue that empathy constitutes the mode in which lyric poetry registers in the readers.

Lyrical poetry examples