Revisionary temporal experiences: how a recognition of tachypsychia in verse alters interpretation

The human mind experiences time as more flexible than suggested by today’s precisely regulated clocks. Seeking to understand this troubled relationship with temporality, this project examines representations of time in the verse of the Early Modem and Victorian eras. In literature that predates the discovery of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the fMRI, science alone cannot serve as an explanatory refuge for the mind’s intrinsic ability to bend time. Poetry offers a flexible space for the portrayal of alterations in temporal perception. My particular focus is tachypsychia, a feeling of time slowing down, often generated by traumatic events. Recognizing these experiences of temporal strangeness as neurologically based, this paper will establish that tachypsychia is a common human experience that was captured in poetic form before science ever understood the phenomenon. Identifying this in canonical works from John Donne and Alfred Lord Tennyson also fundamentally alters the interpretation of these poetic works.