A discovery

First published in Column 8 on the 23^rd February 1994

Last year I queried whether poetry had any economic value. I’m happy to report now that doctors in England say it has, and are confident of using it to reduce some of the 80 million pounds per annum spent on antidepressants.

In a study at Bristol University, doctors discovered that a few lines by poets such as Wordsworth, Keats or Browning could overcome a depressed patient’s need for pills.

Just a few lines? I find this a little surprising. The whole of Paradise Lost would at time hardly have been sufficient to set me straight again.

Let’s take up our Palgrave’s [see below], return to the poets mentioned, and see how appropriate their verses might be.

Here’s Wordsworth:

She lived alone, and few could know

             When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and oh,

            The difference to me!

Given the right circumstances, this might well give a depressed husband a life. But what about this bit of Keats?

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

            With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here

            On the cold hill’s side.

That sounds more like the sort of thing Jenny Shipley should be reading every morning before breakfast. On the other hand, being the wise, all-knowing lady she is, maybe she would recommend this for the nation:

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,

            And frequent sights of what is to be borne!

Such sights, or worse, as are before me here:-

            Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

Browning and Shipley might well be soulmates. Here he is in a mood calculated to make every manjack and womanjill pull themselves up by the bootstraps:

Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough.

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!

            Be our joys three-parts pain!

            Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!

(There are 31 more stanzas of like ilk to make you leap out of your gloom.)

It’s plain that the choice of poem counts for a good deal in this therapy. What’s good for the goose may not so befit the gander, but I suppose there’s a chance some of the heavy stuff might lift the spirit through sheer perversity:

The rain set early in tonight

            The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

            And did its worst to vex the lake,

I listened with heart fit to break…

Just the thing for depressed Christmas campers – though that poem improves with the timely appearance of lady called, inelegantly, Porphyria.

Perhaps we’re again unfair and choosing the wrong poets. What about Tennyson?

As thro’ the land at eve we went,

            And pluck’d the ripen’d ears

We fell out, my wife and I,

We fell out, I know not why

            And kiss’d again with tears. 

Hmmm. Let’s try further back. Here’s Fletcher:

There’s nought in this life sweet,

If man were wise to see’t,

            But only melancholy,

            O sweetest melancholy!

After these examples, I can only assume the doctors’ choice of poems was more fitting than those I found by plunging into Palgrave.

(Apropos of nothing, I was intrigued to find that Browning had hidden marketing skills: he wrote a poem called The Lost Leader.)

Portrait of F T Palgrave,
not looking his most cheerful

Palgrave's Golden Treasury—originally titled The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language—is a celebrated and highly influential anthology of English poetry. Compiled by English critic and poet Francis Turner Palgrave, it was first published in 1861 and quickly became the definitive collection of British verse for generations of readers.

In her book, The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies andthe Making of British Culture, published as recently as 2023, Clare Bucknell called it ‘…an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and followed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed.’ Hmmm.

Though I can’t find the Bristol study, AI told me this: Modern research, including a notable collaborative UK study by the University of Plymouth and Nottingham Trent University, confirmed that reading and writing poetry can help up to 50% of participants manage depression and anxiety.