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Poetic Renewal and Reparation in the Classroom: Poetry Therapy, Psychoanalysis, and Pedagogy with Three Victorian Poets

Williams, Todd Owen
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1194103428

Abstract Details

2007, PHD, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
By looking at the way therapists use poetry in their practices we can find new approaches to teaching and exploring poetry that will make literary study more valuable to students. Poetry therapists approach poetry by focusing on the reader’s experience of a poem rather than on the poem’s meaning per se. Using this approach to poetry in the classroom has a number of potential benefits for students. First, poetry offers students the opportunity to increase their self-awareness by helping them examine their experience in terms of emotions and images as well as language. Such a process can enable students to have new perceptions and emotional experiences that can benefit them greatly. The study of poetry can also validate students’ emotional experiences, particularly painful ones that are often repressed. And poems can also serve as loving external objects that can help students repair their negative attitudes toward the external world. If we allow students to relate to poems emotionally and imaginatively, we can help them achieve the goals of personal renewal and a more positive relationship to the external world. The study begins by examining students’ defense mechanisms that prevent them from experiencing the benefits of the study of poetry, and by considering how we can use poetry to relax these defenses. It moves on to consider how the regressive nature of poetry helps students to become more self-aware and integrated. The second part of the study presents specific classroom approaches and exercises that enable students to use poetry to achieve renewal, openness, deeper self awareness, reparation, empathy, and a positive yet realistic view of the world. Part two presents approaches based on brief poetry therapy, experiential therapy, and metaphor therapy. The final chapters deal with classroom approaches to three Pre-Raphaelite poets—Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris—whose work is particularly useful for this approach to poetry.
Mark Bracher (Advisor)
257 p.
Poetry therapy; psychoanalysis; Victorian poetry; Pre-Raphaelite

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Williams, T. O. (2007). Poetic Renewal and Reparation in the Classroom: Poetry Therapy, Psychoanalysis, and Pedagogy with Three Victorian Poets [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1194103428

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Williams, Todd. Poetic Renewal and Reparation in the Classroom: Poetry Therapy, Psychoanalysis, and Pedagogy with Three Victorian Poets. 2007. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1194103428.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Williams, Todd. "Poetic Renewal and Reparation in the Classroom: Poetry Therapy, Psychoanalysis, and Pedagogy with Three Victorian Poets." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1194103428

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

kent1194103428
2,744
© 2007, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.