The Psychology of Poetry: How Verse Can Foster Hope
Poetry has the power to help us cope with difficult emotions.
Posted May 20, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
Long before I became a clinical social worker, I was a child who loved reading and writing. My undergraduate degree was in English, and though my career focus evolved over time and took the direction of psychology, my love for the written word never diminished. Time and again, I have come back to poetry, which has served as a descriptor of human experience, a balm for a wounded world, and a humanizing force that mirrors our struggles, resiliency, and triumphs.
There is good reason for this power that poetry has: dating back some 4,300 years, written poetry is the most ancient record of human literature. Many poems, such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Paradise Lost, are still widely read and admired today.
Beyond its longevity, though, there is emerging neuroscience to support the idea that poetry has a significant positive effect on the brain. According to a 2017 study, “poetry is capable of inducing peak emotional experiences, including subjectively reported chills and objectively measured goosebumps” (Wassiliwizky & others, 2017). Those chills and goosebumps that you feel when a line of verse resonates signify how meaningfulness and personal profundity can be found in a poem.
Poetry-elicited chills are similar to those triggered by music and are understood to signify heightened activity within the reward-related brain regions (Blood & Zatorre, 2001). Much like music, “poetry represents an ancient, cross-cultural, and emotionally powerful variety within the human communicative and expressive repertoire” (Bradshaw & others, 2004). All this to say that the power of poetry stretches far beyond being a pleasing string of rhyming words. Poetry lights up our brain’s pleasure centers, allows for a feeling of humanization and commonality, and provides deeply resonant emotional responses.
Why does poetry stand the test of time, and how does it intersect with psychology? In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle may have been on to something when he explained the overwhelming impact of tragic drama as the “purging of emotions of pity and fear ” (Miller & Greenberg, 1981). In other words, the impact of these works may be their ability to help us process difficult emotions or experiences, cope with overwhelming or frightening feelings, and release the psychological burden of emotions like shame and fear. While modern psychology does not seek to “purge” or eradicate emotions, it does aim to normalize and humanize those difficult emotions, and poetry can help with that process.
In therapeutic settings, perhaps the most common “presenting issues” are anxiety , depression , fear, discomfort related to transition, and loss and grief , among others. Poetry speaks to all of these. Consider the final stanza of the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
This stanza speaks to human resiliency in the face of challenges. Henly had suffered from tuberculosis and had one of his feet amputated as a result. Despite this, he penned a poem that still has the power, 150 years later, to inspire and to accurately describe the human experience of coping with life’s challenges.
In 1896, English poet A.E. Housman wrote the following:
With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipt maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.
Housman’s meditation on grief and loss speaks to a common and unavoidable human experience. Through a simplistic structure, he describes the heaviness of aging and of death. I could go on and on, naming poems that fit into each category of human emotion , but the point is that poetry and human psychology intersect and that poetry can provide what a 2025 study calls “a collective catharsis” that can enable “individuals to find solace, empowerment, and resilience in their journey toward mental well-being” (Anjanappa, 2025).
Poetry has power beyond just being aesthetically pleasing. Through its ability to artistically and beautifully address our shared human experiences and even increase our sense of hope and optimism despite our challenges—another verse comes to mind here from Emily Dickinson—poetry can serve as an antidote to a life that can be unpredictable and challenging.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all –
A 2016 study of cancer patients revealed that only poetry had the ability to raise patients’ “hope scores” (measures of how hopeful they felt) and even decreased patients’ reported pain intensity (Arruda et al., 2016). Poetry provides not only a therapeutic benefit but also a neurobiological one; by speaking to our most difficult and challenging emotions and experiences, poetry has a healing power and a unique ability to foster resiliency and hope.
Wassiliwizky E, Koelsch S, Wagner V, Jacobsen T, Menninghaus W. The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Aug 1;12(8):1229-1240. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsx069. PMID: 28460078; PMCID: PMC5597896.
Blood A.J., Zatorre R.J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 98(20), 11818–23.
Bradshaw T., Nichols B., Bauerlein M. (2004). Reading at risk: a survey of literary reading in America. National Endowment for the Arts report 46. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts
Miller, R., Greenberg, R.A. (1981). Poetry and Psychology. In: Poetry. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06317-8_15
William Ernest Henley, "Invictus" from Poems (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920): 83-84. Public domain.
Housman, A. E. “With Rue My Heart Is Laden.” In A Shropshire Lad . London, 1896. Public domain.
Anjanappa, S. (2025). Poetry and Mental Health: Exploring the Therapeutic Power of the Written Word. Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities. 12. 194-197. 10.34293/sijash.v12iS4.May.9183.
Dickinson, E. (1955). “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.” In T. H. Johnson (Ed.), The poems of Emily Dickinson . Belknap Press.
Arruda, Maurilene Andrade Lima Bacelar, et al. “Evaluation of the Effects of Music and Poetry in Oncologic Pain Relief: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” Journal of Palliative Medicine , vol. 19, no. 9, Sept. 2016, pp. 943–948, https://doi.org/10.1089/jpm.2015.0528 .
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Phil Lane, MSW, LCSW, is a psychotherapist in private practice and the author of the book Understanding and Coping with Illness Anxiety.
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