Poetry as a Key to the Unlocking of the Self

Abstract

In a series of brief narratives, the author demonstrates poetry’s self-explanatory and self-expressive powers. He includes experiences with emotionally disturbed preschoolers, hospitalized schizophrenic children, brain-injured and autistic preadolescents, adolescent victims of advanced cerebral palsy and dystonia muscularum deformans, adult schizophrenics both hospitalized and in halfway houses, withdrawn elderly, and a woman terminally ill. Examples of their creative work underscore the dramatic process of self-liberation that occurred in each instance.