It’s National Poetry Month this April. Is it worth celebrating?

After all, poetry doesn’t seem to be doing much to alleviate the tension in our communities. Ask some of the middle schoolers I’ve taught in the past, and they might say a whole month dedicated to poetry is a time for mourning, not celebration.

In the piece “what can a poem do?,” even professional poet Darius V. Daughtry seems to agree. Right away, he admits the difficult truth: No matter how much you enjoy it, a poem can’t save your life. It can’t “Luke Cage” your skin in a Marvel Comics deus ex machina.

By itself, a poem can’t fix injustice, prevent violence, or erase mistakes we’ve made.

But it can “hold you and scold you at the same time,” Daughtry writes; it can “make you float . . . introduce you to yourself . . . I wonder where we’d be if the masses knew / just what a poem could do.”

Researchers are new to studying the implications of poetry for well-being and the brain. Still, it may surprise you “what a poem could do…,” how poetry changes our brains, and what you might get out of celebrating National Poetry Month yourself.

The benefits of reading poetry

The next time you see the doctor, it’s unlikely that they will prescribe you Alfred Tennyson or Naomi Shihab Nye—but maybe they should. A variety of studies find that poetry can benefit your physical and mental well-being.

One 2023 study found that participants in a virtual COVID-19 poetry community experienced Mental health benefits; other research finds that therapy incorporating poetry can improve well-being for people in palliative care.

A 2022 study found creative expression therapy using poetry was a powerful trauma support tool for unaccompanied refugee minors from Afghanistan; and poetry activities have been linked to improved Self-awareness, healthier functioning, and increased positive social interactions, especially when implemented alongside therapeutic storytelling, for people with certain unhealthy coping mechanisms.

This research has sparked fresh interest in the fields of bibliotherapy and poetry therapy, represented by the National Association for Poetry Therapy and the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, which offer programming, credentialing, and The Journal of Poetry Therapy.

While the term “bibliotherapy” is defined variably, it sometimes involves reading poetry, and it shows promise for improving health. Poetry therapy is apt for giving voice to and constructing meaning from core metaphors patients hold about their lives, argue scholars from Colorado State University.

I’ve seen this power in action while teaching the poem “Identity” by Julio Noboa Polanco, whose final verse declares, “I’d rather smell of musty, green stench / than of sweet, fragrant lilac. / If I could stand alone, strong and free, / I’d rather be a tall, ugly weed.”

A poem that praises the virtue of “sticking out,” “Identity” tends to resonate with middle schoolers, who frequently chafe against pressure to conform to expectations during adolescence. Students facing this struggle for acceptance can feel affirmed by the speaker’s endorsement of individuality, even when uniqueness runs counter to popular visions of beauty or correctness.

Poetry for kinder communities

In addition to these individual benefits, poetry may also help us build empathy for each other and, in doing so, strengthen our relationships. In 2021, Kent State University researchers put this idea to the test by investigating whether poetry could decrease the stigma against individuals who are incarcerated.

Participants in prisons wrote poems about their childhoods, and researchers compared people’s responses to the poems and other material. They found that while personal contact with incarcerated individuals was the most powerful force against stigma, the poems were significantly more effective at humanizing their authors than news stories.

In fact, news stories portraying incarcerated people positively led to the same response as sensational news stories about recidivism.

The authors suspected a variety of causes: For one, a person’s art is a reminder of their humanity. Further, “poet” is a prosocial identity—a role widely thought of as cooperative and helpful for society—while the identity of “inmate” is viewed less positively. And the childhood perspective could have also made a difference because public opinion is more open to juvenile rehabilitation.

No matter the combination of factors, it was impossible to ignore that these poems helped readers see the authors in a new light.

Researcher Jeroen Dera wondered if something similar might be happening in the #poetry TikTok affinity group. This informal community on the popular social media app consists of self-proclaimed amateur poets and readers exchanging verses, with an audience of more than 70 billion users at the time of Dera’s study.

Previous research from Lili Pâquet had suggested that while the poetry shared on social media is often perceived as shallow, critics who dismiss it as low-brow or trite overlook its important spirit of self-help.

Pâquet believed that instead of further quarantining academic culture from popular interest, scholars should recognize these poems as legitimate—so Dera conducted his own analysis of posts and engagement under #poetry and related tags.

He found that #poetry content, in resisting social media stereotypes of instant gratification and instead prompting nuanced critical discussions as well as therapeutic applications, lived up to what are ultimately the real qualifications of poetry: using language to unite the mind and heart. Further, it reflected a desire for bridging cultures, connection, and forming like-minded community rather than entrepreneurship and personal interest.

It wasn’t just “legitimate” poetry—it was also relationship-driven despite its platform’s usual fixations on profit.

All of this is encouraging—and qualitative. We don’t know very much about what’s going on for commenters on poetry content like the posts Dera studied, who quip “Who is cutting onions?” and declare that they feel goosebumps.

In order to objectively assess emotional response, one would at least need to prove that these “goosebumps” commenters report are real.

This is your brain on poetry

Enter the “Goosecam”—a specialized camera engineered to capture goosebumps on film with startling, scientific accuracy.

It sounds goofy, but that’s just what researchers used in one 2017 study out of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. Techniques marrying psychophysiology, neuroimaging, and records of behavior—like participants clicking a button when they felt chills—helped this group measure emotional responses to recitations of poetry.

The team noticed that an area of the brain involved in pleasure called the nucleus accumbens behaved uniquely in response to poetry, showing that listeners can feel the most aesthetic pleasure while showing physiological markers of negative emotion. When humans are most “moved,” it seems to be from a complex mix of pleasure and suffering.

Even more interestingly, the experiment’s elaborate logistics for tracking the sensation of chills enabled it to identify key “chill-driving features of poetic language,” including word positions (chills were most likely to occur at the ends of lines, stanzas, or poems) and speech acts (participants were more likely to feel chills during lines or phrases coding social communication or emotion, like use of second-person pronouns like “you”).

Another 2016 article, in which Christina Wu of University College London explained cognitive neuroscience principles through the lens of the T.S. Eliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” reveals the psychology of why we feel aesthetic pleasure from poetic phenomena in the first place.

While other human pleasures, like cinnamon rolls (or more harmful substances researched by psychologists), trigger the brain’s dopamine-based “wanting system,” aesthetic pleasure comes from a more “disinterested interest”—a fascination without desire more associated with our brain’s opiate- and cannabinoid-based “liking system,” she writes.

Wu explains that our brains derive pleasure from poetry based on four categories of experience:

• Making connections, especially across distance. It gives the brain pleasure when we untangle the unlikely associations of a clever metaphor or themes and motifs in a piece. This satisfies our brains’ pattern recognition impulse and is even more gratifying if we’re connecting concepts that don’t seem like they’re very related.
• Problem-solving, especially when a problem resists solving. Problem-solving, similarly, is more chemically satisfying when it’s challenging. In a poem that resists interpretation, as we untangle and construct meaning in one spot while raising questions in another, our higher mental effort actually results in increased feelings of pleasure.
• Predicting and confirming or challenging our predictions. The greater the gap between our prediction and the outcome, the larger the possible emotional response. A surprise might come in the form of an unexpected turn of phrase, as in “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
• Learning, especially when learning involves reconciliation. Learning rewards our brains with more pleasure the more neural activity we engage in. According to Wu, new turns of phrase can delight, while tired cliches can feel like beating a dead horse.

Poetry aesthetics may be a new frontier for neuroimaging research, but already it’s clear that there is a wealth of pleasure to be gained from engaging with poems.

Five ways to celebrate National Poetry Month

Here are a few simple ways you can activate your brain’s built-in language appreciation system this month.

1. Cultivate a habit of reading! There is a reason movements like the Poetry in Motion initiative (which has brightened NYC subways with 200-plus poems) and U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón’s You Are Here project (which installs poetry-themed public art in national parks) work: Poetry often doesn’t require a huge time investment. 



That said, reading poetry can feel like swimming against Old Faithful if you have spent years building an aversion to it. Consider what you may need to deconstruct. Remember you are free to enjoy poetry however you like.



Consider reading poems out loud. Wu explains that the sound of a poem can create the same satisfaction as a resolved musical phrase (thanks, mesolimbic striatal system). You can memorize a stanza, like a mantra, if you like—or you can take the advice of former poet laureate Billy Collins in “Introduction to Poetry” and “waterski / across the surface” instead of subjecting yourself to undue pressure.



There are several free poetry e-letters, like Poem-a-Day, the newsletter of the Poetry Foundation, or Poem of the Week from Split This Rock. These sites also have archives you can browse, or you could try podcasts like The Slowdown or On Being if you want to hear a quick verse on your commute. It’s a charcuterie board out there, so sample!


2. Don’t “poet” alone. Consider joining an online community, or see if you can work some verse into a book club or professional growth circle. You may even find your poetry community at home! If you have children, consider reading poetry with them (young ones may enjoy Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky). 



Lean into the styles your group enjoys—and rest assured that while some sources tout the superior aesthetics or therapeutics of “classic” poems, this hasn’t been supported by evidence.



Consider exchanging poems with loved ones. Emily Dickinson was known, even, for sending poems to friends (and writing them on chocolate wrappers: my kind of friend). Do whatever takes the pressure off—a circle of friends exchanging chocolate-wrapper poems Secret Santa–style could offer more joy and connection than you might expect.


3. Engage with live poetry. Consider looking for open mics in your area, and check with your local library or bookstore to see if they offer programming for Poetry Month. After April is over, keep an eye out for readings from local authors and poets.



Support youth in your life who may be participating in Poetry Out Loud by offering to hear their poem and watching the national finals in early May. You can also attend virtual open mics or listen to spoken word poetry on YouTube.



No matter how you get involved this month, there is something powerful and special in reading and celebrating the work of contemporary writers (as the #TeachLivingPoets movement stresses) and in hearing poets read their own work out loud.


4. Learn something new. See if there’s one new thing you can discover this month about the craft or history of poetry. 



Perhaps you’d be interested in brushing up on figurative language or exploring what common phrases you use that come from poetry. Maybe you’d be interested to learn about poets who have written in response to one another and why—or maybe you’d enjoy checking out a form that is new to you, like the prose poem or lyric essay.



There is an abundance of learning materials online from YouTube and organizations like Poetry in America, Coursera, and Masterclass, as well as special offerings for April.

5. Give yourself permission to play! Try a few writing exercises or have fun imitating a poem you enjoy. Free yourself to play with parody or enjoy collaborative writing with ChatGPT. Consider exploring sound, rhythm, and metaphor in ways you haven’t before or haven’t experimented with in a while.



For a place to start, try this prompt for free verse: Write a poem that is a list of short thank-you notes to the tangible objects you are grateful for today. Describe them in as much detail as possible without saying what they are.

Happy writing!