Psychological Poetry
Psychological poetry analyzed
Psychological Poetry. In The Psychology of Poetry Claudia Miclaus states,
“The first psychological perspective on poetry belongs to the writer, and the second one belongs to the reader. Writer’s perspective is related to the reasons why he/she likes to write poetry, whereas the reader’s perspective refers to why people like to read poetry, why they enjoy this artistic means of expression.”
However, the “psychology of poetry” is different from “psychological poetry.” The former concerns reasons or motivations for writing and/or reading any poetry. The terms psychological poetry and psychological poems are more specific, referring to a genre of poetic writing. Poetry itself
“…is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.”
One might conclude that all poetry is psychological poetry. Richard Brostoff in his Some Thoughts on the Relationship Between Poetry and Psychology writes,
“Poetry offers psychology its own perspective on the reaches of this realm, a unique repository not only of energy, but also of imagery, metaphor, paradox, inversion, contradiction, and often enough, beauty. Rather than a territory to be conquered, poetry valorizes and embraces the resources of the unconscious; it celebrates rather than subdues its creative genius. The poem invites our fascinated commerce with our deep world beneath the world; it invites us to linger in the sensory experience of its inhabiting…
“…Often enough, having entered an underworld, the poem suggests: you were here once, lived here, knew this, and the sense of discovery is a bit like walking into that odd, half-ruined city below the city in Rome—sitting there all the time waiting to be recovered, entered and explored in all its strangeness…
“…Of course the terrain of poetry is not one of unstructured wilderness; it insists, much like psychology, on the ordering, structuring principle of craft (in some ways analogous to the ego or analyst), which holds, with form, in dynamic tension the disorder and storm force of the abyss. In the vessel of language, irreducible metaphor and structure, poetry holds in suspension contradiction and paradox, our conflicts and wild energies; it achieves a dynamic balance between the visible and invisible worlds, surface and depth, valorizing neither at the expense of the other…”
