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Palaeopoetics: Prefatory notes toward a cognitive history of poetry

As a verbal artifact, a poem draws upon a number of nonverbal structures in the brain. Even before the emergence of language, certain behaviors had to have been in place, e.g. an increased capacity to bind perceptual data and process them as single events (episodes) and the ability to reproduce perceived actions (mimesis). These two evolutionary phases, according to Merlin Donald, preceded language, but to allow for the emergence of that specific activity we know as poetry, two other behaviors must also have evolved – play and tool-making. Play supplied episodes with frames and as-if intentionality, while tool-making skills enhanced mimesis by crafting artifacts that were saved and reused. Palaeopoetics, which I would define as the study of cognitive skills preadaptive to verbal poiesis, is a project that examines play, episodic awareness, mimesis, and tool-making as forming the common foundation upon which all the myriad varieties of oral and written poetry have been built.