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This paper confronts two approaches to poetry, Cognitive Poetics and Historical Poetics, with reference to rhyme. Cognitive poetics obtains from readers responses to the perceived qualities of poetry, and offers cognitive theories systematically to relate them to poetic structures with which they have been regularly associated. With reference to ages remote in time, historical poetics considers such an approach an anachronism, and is interested, rather, in the responses of the poet's contemporaries. Both approaches resort to quantitative analyses of observable facts in poetry, but they make inferences from the results to the readers' responses in different ways. Historical poetics makes commonsense inferences from regularities discovered in the poet's practice to the shared responses of his contemporaries. According to Cognitive Poetics, "wide quantitative analyses of observable facts" can reveal only what the poet wrote, but not how his contemporaries responded to it. Valid inferences about the responses of the poet's contemporaries must be based both on regularities discovered in the poets' practice, and on the best available evidence concerning how human beings respond to poetic structures, in general. The present work investigates some cognitive mechanisms relevant to the processing of rhyme, such as semantic coding and information processing on the one hand, and, on the other, phonetic coding and the acoustic ingredient reverberating in short-term memory. Reading abilities as well as response to rhyme require reliance on "phonetic coding"; poor readers tend to rely more on "semantic coding", and to respond to rhyme differently. The present approach was criticised in the following terms: "Poetry of earlier epochs was, naturally, written to be read; and not by an abstract reader 'in general,' or by a modern reader, but by the poet's contemporaries. The poet and his audience shared the same poetic culture". "My first disagreement with Professor Tsur lies in his reliance on a reader 'in general,' or on a modern reader rather than on the reader of a particular period. For example, 'grammatical' rhymes may seem uninteresting and flat, while 'anti-grammatical' rhymes may seem 'vigorous' and clever to the modern reader; but the modern reader is familiar with Butler, Pope, Byron, and Tennyson, while Chaucer's contemporaries (and Chaucer's rhymes are given as an example of grammatical, and therefore not vigorous rhymes) were amazed that rhyming could be used in poetry at all!" In response to this criticism the following is suggested: "In the case of grammatical and anti-grammatical rhyme, for instance, we should take into account two kinds of variables: information-processing activities and familiarity. It is the activity of the information-processing mechanism that determines the relatively vigorous or tame character of rhyme. Unexpectedness may heighten the effect of this activity; familiarity may blunt it". The notion "the poet's contemporaries" suggests "the fallacy of homogeneous past": there is no reason to suppose that the poetic tastes and responses to poetry of the "poet's contemporaries" were any more homogeneous than those of our own contemporaries. A quantitative survey of short equi-rhymed poems in Schirman's anthology suggests that 11th century Hebrew poets did distinguish between the various kinds of rhymes, and had a wide range of preferences. Far from relying "on a reader 'in general,' or on a modern reader", Cognitive Poetics helps to break up a homogeneous past into a multiplicity of related attitudes, but avoiding scepticism, idiosyncrasy, or chaos. While the historical approach encountered here "is based not so much on insight and intuition as on wide quantitative analyses of observable facts", Cognitive Poetics assumes that the readers of past ages had insights and intuitions, no less than present-day readers; that to understand such insights and intuitions one must study the responses of living readers, and then try to find out in what respects can the responses of readers in the past be supposed to differ from the responses of present-day readers; and that to abandon such inquiries is too high a price to pay for scientific "objectivity".
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