The Value of Poetic Expression, Revisited

A path to understand, celebrate, and heal

*This article has been revised and updated from my personal vault and repurposed for Medium and Substack. It originally appeared in my Psychology Today blog on April 10, 2023.

Poems are made for the express purpose of re-figuring the world. They have no other reason for being. In them, metaphors are completely at home. In poems, metaphors subtly materialize or dynamically burst out of their contexts and make readers see the world anew. — Frederick Buell

In honor of the recent Poetry Month, I would like to share what I have experienced using poetry for my solace and with others in my psychotherapy practice. Poetry is an aesthetic segue to sharing personal narratives beyond certain cultural constraints. There is always a tension between our natural abilities of intuitive thinking and how we are forced, in many instances, to deny that capability. As late anthropologist Gregory Bateson asserted: “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”

Why We Need Poetry

Culture is “The customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.” It is supported by subtle and not-so-subtle psychologies within such institutions as schooling, politics, medicine, economics, and media. Bateson alludes to problems when these institutions are seen as separate or fragmented…