Our congratulations to Dr Belinda Jack, whose new article has been published in the medical journal The Lancet. Titled 'Poetry and Emotion', the publication investigates the intimate relationship between the text and the reader, and how verse can be used to process unarticulated experiences.

Dr Jack analyses such poems as Walking Away by Cecil Day Lewis and Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. Here is a summary of the article:

Poetry has not always been considered a benign influence. And the concept of emotion has a long history. For Plato, the nature of the emotional response stimulated by poetry was of a 'lower' order. What mattered was the appeal to reason. If poetry quickly stirs the emotions, this is an appeal to immediate instinct and therefore a harmful force. But how did the ancients understand the concept of emotion? For Galen of Pergamum, by contrast, what mattered about emotion was that it was both a response to being moved by something as well as a prompt to action.

Please, see the full article here.

The header image is a plate depicting emotions of grief, from Charles Darwin's book The Expression of the Emotions. © Wikimedia Commons / Artist unknown.