Poetry and the Pandemic: How to Deal With Trauma

"April is the cruellest month..."

This is how T. S. Eliot opens his most famous poem, "The Waste Land." Is April really the most brutal period of the year simply because it extracts life from death? Colorful flowers from rigid lands, vigor from lethargy?

April doesn’t let the calm and protective winter snow win over the energetic spring sun. But this year, we didn’t really get the chance to feel the positive, awakening light of April on our skin. The pandemic hit hard. Instead of breaking the ice, we continued to freeze.

This year, poetry couldn’t invoke the strength of the warmest season. But could it help us in some other ways?

The essence of some poetry reminds me of a specific kind of human reasoning: concrete thinking. Concrete thinking focuses on tangible objects and on the here-and-now events, lacking the conceptualization and generalization typical of abstract thinking. The way children think is naturally concrete: For example, they can hardly distinguish the finger they are looking at from the concept of a finger, or they can hardly discriminate themselves from others. In psychoanalytical terms, concrete thinking is defined as the lack of symbol formation: the pathological inability to derive abstract generalizations from concrete contingencies.

But what happens if we can’t symbolize reality?

On the one hand, we can’t categorize, separate, or organize ideas, thoughts, and concepts in an orderly and logical manner. On the other hand, we can’t differentiate between meanings we attribute to elements and aspects of the world. Examples of this fluidity of meanings are positive language symptoms associated with schizophrenia, such as idiosyncratic semantic associations, the invention of new words (neologisms), and word approximation. Word approximation is an alteration of speech in which words are used unconventionally or inadequately or novel, invented words are derived from usual ones.

And here it comes into play, the poetic language. Traits typical to word approximation are commonly used in poetry and can be useful to deal with trauma.

Let us take the verse that opens this article: "April is the cruellest month." Logically speaking, April can’t be cruel. April is a noun adopted by humans to define a moment of the year with stereotypical climatic conditions. Given that cruelty is a moral judgment, only humans are cruel.

However, in the poetic context, the “humanization of April” becomes a useful expedient. The warmth of April is now the long-time rival of the coldness of March and of the previous winter months. The readers can clearly imagine the scene in their mind. In other words, Eliot creates a visual metaphor to psychically process the feeling of cruelty and to cope with it. The efficacy of this poetic trick is no coincidence.

Research shows that concrete, experience-based processing of trauma is a very good strategy to prevent intrusive memories. In light of a traumatic experience, people are asked to focus on what they experienced and felt, on the details and progression of events, instead of wondering why it happened to them or what is the meaning of their trauma. Concrete processing is able to limit the recall of autobiographical memories; it reduces negative self-judgments and, overall, helps to strengthen skills in social problem-solving.

This is what Thomas Eliot does in the opening of "The Waste Land." He describes an abstract and complex feeling like cruelty by recreating concrete metaphors. In other words, poetry does not show the meaning of emotions and feelings. It stages them. As seen above, this can be an effective healing strategy in response to trauma.

But poetry can do more. Poetry can help the readers to live the traumatic present by judging it less and by not escaping from it. When we live in the moment, we are spontaneous and unaware; we don’t question reality; we don’t try to categorize it; we don’t seek meaning. In simple terms, we don’t immediately judge and condemn what we experience. We instead unconsciously contemplate reality, as if we were alien observers who wish to deeply comprehend something they are seeing for the first time.

Let us think about the pandemic. The word “pandemic” is instantly associated with negative meanings and outcomes, such as “contagion,” “illness,” “death.” This is what the pandemic does to humans, and we should be totally aware of it in order to protect ourselves. But the immediate labeling and categorizing do not help us to acknowledge the existence of the pandemic. They instead prompt us to reject it.

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We are therefore left with a simple question: How can we emotionally accept the pandemic?

Before anything else, we must recognize that the pandemic does exist. We must stand in front of it, observe it, and metaphorically walk through it. We must not suppress the trauma, but—first of all—learn to live within it, without a priori labeling and judging it.

The poet William Carlos Williams understood this pretty well. He was a doctor. This is how he feels about the coming spring in his By the road to the contagious hospital:

"Lifeless in appearance, sluggish

dazed spring approaches—"

The day Williams wrote his verses, he had—most likely—seen a multitude of seriously ill patients. But in the “dried weeds,” in the “twiggy stuff of brushes and small trees” along the way to the hospital, he could witness a spring season that was lifeless only in appearance. It was not the spring season to be devoid of life, but rather his emotional perception of it. In his poem, he predicted that novel energy would inevitably come to shape the vigor of the approaching season.

Williams understood that a stronger vitality would emerge from trespassing the trauma.