Understanding our Deepest Feelings Through Poetry

By Christopher Costello, BA and Ran. D. Anbar, MD

Both poetry and successful psychotherapy can require us to access our deepest feelings. Thus, the task of “finding the right words in the right order” unites the clinician, the patient, and the poet, according to psychotherapist Jeremy Holmes (2008). By externalizing feelings onto the page, patients can begin to understand and act to change themselves.

For instance, in this post, 23-year-old Christopher Costello describes how poetry helped him deal better with his social anxiety disorder.

Poetry and My Stutter

My anxiety often reveals itself as a stutter, directly blocking my ability to communicate. Something as simple as ordering food in a restaurant can become a trying ordeal when my body feels like it’s rebelling against my mind. The stutter began in grade school, and I have tried a number of techniques for dealing with it. Speech therapy proved unhelpful, but I had significant success using therapy with hypnosis to tap into my unconscious mind.

I believe that my undergraduate training as a poet, with its emphasis on a logic of association rather than strict reality, also prepared me well for my therapy work. Hypnosis and poetry require a similar kind of openness to the unknown and a willingness to experiment. Composing poetry creates its own rhythm, helping writers bypass the conscious mind and to use the associative, poetic logic of the unconscious.

One of the most troubling things about anxiety is that it can be hard to pin down what will tip it off. My anxiety often grows out of the smallest, most inconsequential social interactions and spirals until I’m left questioning my own existence. In these tumultuous moments, poetry provides a way of making sense of the world.

I have often used poetry as a coping mechanism for anxiety. When it’s just me and the infinite possibility of the blank page, I can turn that moment into an opportunity for greater self-understanding. An inability to speak becomes, in one of my poems,

“A crowded mass of logs blocking the river of my throat.”

In writing about the stutter, I snap out of the vortex of thoughts caused by the event itself. I feel that something like a purge of my thoughts occurs: Once they’re on the page, they are out of my head. There is a sense that externalizing the emotion helps neutralize it. Rather than being consumed by my anxiety, I can evaluate it objectively.

More than this, however, I feel that poetry has transformative power. Precisely because poetry is not bound by the strict linguistic rules of the sentence, it allows me to see the correspondences between apparently unlike things. It allows me to hold hope and despair simultaneously.

A nightingale

Source: Matushaban/Shutterstock

John Keats and Tuberculosis

For me, there are few more striking examples of the power of therapeutic expressive poetry than that of John Keats (Cox, 2009). At 25 years of age, the celebrated Romantic poet was wracked by a stubborn cough, the harbinger of which had been a fever. In the dramatic eyes of Keats, his cough couldn’t have meant anything other than the most devastating disease of his time, tuberculosis. Given this, it is unsurprising that his most famous poem imagines a flight from these conditions.

“Ode to a Nightingale” was written just as Keats’ symptoms seized him. He writes compellingly of his lost youth, which,

“Grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs.”

The titular bird is free of all this. Untroubled by fluid in its lungs, the nightingale,

“Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

Lines like these speak to poetry’s ability to manage contradictory emotions. Prose could accomplish something similar, but poetry’s emphasis on association over strict reality means that it can examine the extremes of the human condition in close proximity. It is as if the nightingale’s song takes on its utopian qualities because of the poet’s waning youth. The two are formally bound together by the poem in a way that a longer prose piece might struggle to replicate.

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Although Keats paints a grim picture of his physical condition, he can always focus on that nightingale, that utopian figure of flight, escape, and new possibilities. But the bird is not just an animal. It moves “on the wings of poesy,” an archaic word for poetry or poetics. For Keats, there was something unique about the art of poetry, its relationship to language and the world, which made it vital in the most difficult times.

Poetic Imagery

Just as Keats was able to hold deprivation and freedom together in the image of the nightingale, converting my stutter into an image helps to see its potential. The stutter was not only a stutter. It didn’t just stop me from speaking, it gave rise to an opportunity for self-reflection.

The moment ceased to be a whirlwind in which I am trapped, and becomes something I can grab onto. The metaphorization of the experience lends a concreteness it would otherwise lack. Comparing my anxiety to “a mass of logs” renders it comprehensible. It no longer feels like an alien power that has taken me over. Instead, it becomes something I can understand.

Keats’ experience resonates with me because it captures the power of poetry to transport us beyond ourselves. When I write, I imagine Keats, bedridden and slipping away, but still able to make out the faint birdsong beyond the window. That’s what poetry is: It’s a way of looking at the world, a mode of listening for the birds, especially when it’s dark outside.

Takeaway

Although I was introduced to poetry outside of a therapeutic context, I believe that my experience demonstrates that poetry can be useful in a clinical setting. Kempler (2003) suggests, in terms reminiscent of the ones I have used here, that poetry’s unique grammatical structure can allow patients to “re-invent themselves.” Because poetry is not bound by the strictures of the sentence, it allows patients to access parts of themselves that would be closed off by the conscious mind.

Raab (2021) suggests that patients keep a journal of their daily lives and make note of where “words sing.” In the view of poetry outlined here, words sing when they hold contradictory emotions together, when they give voice to those feelings that are otherwise ineffable. Keeping a “poetry journal” may help patients stay attuned to those moments and, in so doing, improve therapeutic outcomes.

Other forms of creativity such as drawing, painting, sculpting, photography, filmmaking, making music, acting, and dancing, may similarly help patients view their thoughts and emotions from new perspectives, and thus allow them to consider and process them differently.

It is my hope that this post will provide an opening to consider the role of poetry, and creative expression more broadly, in the therapeutic process.