Belinda Jack examines the growing field and considers the therapeutic effects of poetry.
I’d like to consider poetry and its less obvious role within the medical humanities. Like the novel, poetry can tell us about human experience, but it does this in its own language and not the more straightforward language of prose. It works by suggestion, but this doesn’t mean that it cannot console, teach, amuse, enlighten, mimic, disconcert and so much more. It can capture – or cause us to reconstruct – experiences and feelings that we might otherwise not be conscious of. Poetry’s use of language is at the furthest extreme from the self-help book, which is often dogmatic, insistent, reductive, bullying even. Philip Davis, in his excellent 2013 study Reading and the Reader, describes Wordsworth’s poetry not as providing “ideas”, but rather as providing places from which our own ideas – which were Wordsworth’s too, no doubt – may come into being.
-- sdh
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