David,
Good essay on writing and speech, sound and sense. I think there are a good number who have studied this kind of thing with poetry.
Your; "As I've said in an essay, empathy is a civilizing experience. It's an important form of play that adults too often lose sight of."
I agree with you, and if I may add, studies have shown that some people simply do not have the capacity for empathy to any great extent--it is a brain thing. Some people can do math, some can do music, some have emotional intelligence while others don't, etc. Take my brother-in-law, for example; no empathy at all: if it doesn't bounce, crash, or go 'boom', it doesn't exist. Ask him about "FLIR" and he will tell you. (Forward Looking Infared Radar) People have different smarts.
Also, I'd like to add that writers today need to include as much knowledge of modern psycho-dynamics as possible in their concepts of writing and subject. Freud, Jung, unconsious conditioning, social-economic conditioning, class, culture, education, personal development, self-actualization, and a dozen other approaches to what I call consciousness, poetry as consciousness.
Too many poets write without regard to science as well as a disregard to literary history.
Take Sylvia Plath, for example, some of her poems do seem disturbed, or, problematic, and they were written when psychiatric help was a sort of skeleton in the closet. Now, poems like hers, would elicit from me the response, go get some help.
The point, going back to empathy, is, that people either can't do 'empathy' or, if they can but don't, they are either conditioned out of it, not trained in it, or they are psychologically blocked from feeling empathy because of some reason.
The Myers-Briggs discussion relates to this.
Sound......empathy..... So, David, what's next?
TJ
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