Poetry can help people cope with loneliness, isolation, depression

People who feel lonely, isolated, anxious, or depressed could find relief by writing, reading, and sharing poetry – even in this era of WhatsApp and immediate communication. 

Research by the UK’s University of Plymouth and Nottingham Trent University found that many people involved in poetry during the COVID-19 pandemic and other periods of great stress experienced a “demonstrable positive impact on their well-being.” The findings are based on a survey of 400 people showing that poetry helped those experiencing common mental health symptoms as well as those suffering from grief.

The study was carried out with registered users of the website poetryandcovid.com who used the website to share their own poetry and/or read other people’s. Just over half of respondents indicated that reading and/or writing poetry had helped them deal with feelings of loneliness or isolation, and for half, it had helped with feelings of anxiety and depression.

Around a third (34%) felt that engaging with the website helped them feel “less anxious”, almost a fourth (24%) felt that it helped them “feel better able to handle my problems”, some 17% expressed that it enabled them to deal with issues relating to bereavement, and 16% said it assisted with ongoing mental health symptoms.

The team published their findings in the Journal of Poetry Therapy under the title “Poetry and COVID-19: The benefit of poetry and the poetryandcovidarchive.com website to mental health and wellbeing.”

"The substantial power of poetry"

“These results demonstrate the substantial power of poetry,” said poetry and creative writing Prof. Anthony Caleshu, the lead investigator at the University of Plymouth. In addition to supporting their health and well-being, the website promoted social and cultural recovery and offered an understanding of how poetry was being used as a mode of discourse during the pandemic. It now provides a historical archive for how people around the world used English language poetry to navigate crises, he said.

From June 2020 to June 2021, the website (now archived as poetryandcovidarchive.com) served as a platform for poetic responses by people from around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. The site featured over 1,000 poems by 600 poets and received about 100,000 views from people from 128 countries – with most being submitted by the writers themselves.

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Poetry received a significant boost in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Politicians, medics, teachers, protesters, and all manner of people from around the world and in various circumstances turned to poetry as a means of coping with the new reality, the authors wrote. For example, in April 2020, The Wall Street Journal published “Poetry for a Pandemic,” telling us that “in the lugubrious poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, there are flashes of optimism that can comfort and inspire us.”

One participant in the study wrote: “Poetry has been a lifeline throughout the pandemic, both reading and writing it, sometimes a strong rope and other times a thin little string.”

Another wrote: “I’m looking to submit some poetry related to my father’s recent passing, which was due to COVID-19. I want to capture some of the conflicting emotions I’ve been feeling since news of several promising vaccines [has] been reported so close to his death. I hope the piece will connect with others who have lost loved ones, but also provide hope for those who are isolated and waiting for loved ones to return home. This is my first piece of poetry.”

Co-investigator Prof. Rory Waterman of Nottingham Trent University, said: “It’s likely that tethering poetry to a community-building platform, in this case the website, has had a particularly positive effect on the relationship between poetry and wellbeing, as it’s a way of bringing people together, the ice already having been broken.

“It’s also likely that other modes of creative and expressive writing – trying to find the right words for experience or circumstance, and then sharing them reciprocally – may positively affect people’s health in a similar way. The wider arts, including visual and performing arts, likely have comparable potential," Waterman said.

"This study shows that creativity, coupled with the opportunity for safe and supportive explication and discussion, can help people endure difficult times and circumstances by providing outlets through which they can work at making sense of experience.”