This book explores the deep, imaginative, and creative power of poetry as part of the human experience. How poetry provides insight into human psychology is a question at the beginning of its theoretical development, and is a constant challenge for cultural psychologists and the humanities alike. Poetry functions, in all ages and cultures, as a rite that merges the beauty, truth and the unbearable conditions of existence. Both the general and the particular can be found in its expression. Collectively the authors aim to evoke a holistic understanding of what poetry conveys about decision making and the human search for meaning. This ground-breaking collection will be indispensable to scholars of clinical and theoretical psychology, philosophy, anthropology, literature, aesthetics and sociology.

This book explores the deep, imaginative, and creative power of poetry as part of the human experience. How poetry provides insight into human psychology is a question at the beginning of its theoretical development, and is a constant challenge for cultural psychologists and the humanities alike. Poetry functions, in all ages and cultures, as a rite that merges the beauty, truth and the unbearable conditions of existence. Both the general and the particular can be found in its expression. Collectively the authors aim to evoke a holistic understanding of what poetry conveys about decision making and the human search for meaning. This ground-breaking collection will be indispensable to scholars of clinical and theoretical psychology, philosophy, anthropology, literature, aesthetics and sociology.

Exploring the potential of poetry and poetic language as a means of conveying perspectives on ageing and later life, this book examines questions such as 'how can we understand ageing and later life?' and 'how can we capture the ambiguities and complexities that the experiences of growing old in time and place entail?' As poetic language illuminates, transfigures and enchants our being in the world, it also offers insights into the existential questions that are amplified as we age, including the vulnerabilities and losses that humble us and connect us. Literary gerontology and narrative gerontology have highlighted the importance of linguistic representations of ageing. While the former has been concerned primarily with the analysis of published literary works, the latter has foregrounded the individual and collective meaning making through narrative resources in old age. There has, however, been less interest in how poetic language, both as a genre and as a practice, can illuminate ageing. This volume suggests a path towards the poetics of ageing by means of presenting analyses of published poetry on ageing written by poets from William Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens; the use of reading and writing poetry among ordinary people in old age; and the poetic nuances that emerge from other literary practices and contexts in relation to ageing - including personal poetic reflections from many of the contributing authors. The volume brings together international scholars from disciplinary backgrounds as diverse as cultural psychology, literary studies, theology, sociology, narrative medicine, cultural gerontology and narrative gerontology, and will deploy a variety of empirical and critical methodologies to explore how poetry and poetic language may challenge dominant discourses and illuminate alternative understandings of ageing.