Poetry and Healing at the End of Life

Abstract

Poetry and medicine have common roots in ancient times when the incantation of hopeful spells might have provided the majority of a healer’s interventions. Apollo was the Greek god of both poetry and medicine, with poetry considered the more prestigious. Although relative rank may have changed, poetry and medicine still share their dependence on close observation and the careful use of language, asking us to sort reality from illusion. Poetry deals not with general statements but minute particulars, that is, images that can be as revealing as a pathologist’s slide. Yet, poetry also joins the unlikely and carries us along toward wholeness on a raft of metaphors. Metaphors can connect us to the seriously ill. Such connection is a central determinant of healing at the end of life. My first professional training was as a poet although I also completed premedical requirements. I was surprised by admission to three medical schools and asked my poetry mentor Roland Flint for advice. Flint sat me down in his office and toldmehedidnot think Iwas a genius; unlike Faulkner, for example, he did not think I could go into a basement and come out six months later with a whole fictional county in my head. This was bad news to me, but I listened. Practicing medicine is the best day job a poet could have, he told me, with access to stories not even a genius could possibly make up. Go to medical school and you will be a better poet for it, eventually. Arguably, the greatest English poet, John Keats, and the greatest American poet,