Experiencing language: some thoughts on poetry and psychoanalysis.

The author uses her experiences as a poet and as a psychoanalyst to compare the two. She discusses poems by James Merrill, Philip Larkin, and Theodore Roethke in order to consider how the analyst listens, how the poet writes, how each listens to what is unsaid in the music of language. Rhythm, meter, and the sounds of words constitute this music. Sound and image are means by which language bypasses logic and touches us. Considering how a poem has an impact can teach us something about how words affect us in psychoanalysis.