y valve for unacceptable wishes. By virtue of its closeness to psychopathology, poetry embodies a curative power in much the same way that venom is used to cure snakebite.
Poetry has been used in two ways as a therapeutic instrument (Brand, 1980). The reading of poetry has been used as a major or minor component of therapy in a number of settings to help patients recognize their feelings. The "making" of poetry more actively encourages patients to express the feelings they discover. The writing of poetry, has been used, therefore, as an an alternate means of communication in psychotherapy, as have other forms of writing. In actual practice, it is usual for poetry therapy to combine reading and writing as a way of exploring and describing emotional states that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to characterize.
The purpose of reading poetry is to facilitate the release of feelings. In order to achieve that end, the therapist supposedly selects poems according to Leedy's (1969b) "isoprinciple," the concept that the poem is strongly related to the patient's predominant mood. "Depressed patients are helped by poems sad and gloomy in tone yet having lines or stanzas that reflect hope and optimism..." (Leedy, 1969b, p. 67).
In many instances, however, it is difficult for the therapist to identify different poetic moods and match those moods to those of the patient (Rolfs & Super, 1988). Thus, therapists usually have to employ criteria that go beyond the simple idea of matching the mood of the poem to the mood of the patient or group.
Compared with the reading of poetry as therapy, poetry writing as therapy alters the relation of written work, therapist and patient. Bibliotherapy, the use of literature as a therapeutic modality, is technically confined to the use of existing works as the focus of psychotherapy. "Scribal activity," the actual writing process, goes beyond such a formal constraint...