poetic secretions

[sergebroom]

Page 22 of the March/April 2008 issue of Annals of Improbable Research sent mixed signals about poetry.

On the one hand… They quote Yamin Haskell’s “Poetry or Pathology? Jesuit Hypocondria in Early Modern Naples”. This paper published in Early Science and Medicine mentions that "...in their didactic poems on fishing and chocolate, both published in 1689, two Neapolitan Jesuits digressed to record and lament a devastating ‘plague’ of ‘hypocondria'..." that they claimed to have suffered from.

Fishing and chocolate?

On the other hand… They quote Pyschological Reports’s “Poetry Writing and Secretory Immunoglobin A”, by G.Lowe, J.Beckett and G.Lowe:

17 healthy students provided saliva samples for Immunoglobin A (s-IgA) assay before and after sessions of either writing poetry or reading magazines (control). Levels of s-IgA increased after the poetry-writing sessions but not after reading.

What I want to know is if they wrote in free verse, or if they rhymed. And was there any similar effect from writing prose? What of realistic fiction vs genre fiction’s? Within genre fiction, did it matter whether it was pulpy or serious?

Comments

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

Maybe Isaak Walton was a closet chocoholic?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

From ironmongering to fishing, with too much chocolate along the way? For me, it'd be 'too much coffee' and, speaking of which, it was fascinating, when I read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, to learn that insurer Lloyd's of London started as a coffee house. All that caffeine and they still could assess risks properly...