Why Are We Not Better Than We Are: How Poetry Saves Lives

“…a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time.”

“A life of patient suffering… is a better poem in itself than we can any of us write,” the young poet Anne Reeve Aldrich wrote to Emily Dickinson shortly before her untimely death. “It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical, that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain.”

Sufferin...