How a poem a day can ease life’s pain and help us through the hardest times

From war to weather extremes, loneliness and digital overload, has there ever been a more challenging time for the human psyche? The founder of the Forward Prizes for Poetry explains why we should all be self-medicating with verse

‘In our increasingly secular world, the canon of poetry has become the secular liturgy’ (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

When Covid struck and we were all told to stay at home, I thought my Poetry Pharmacy would come to a halt. It had taken me all over the world, acting as a kind of therapist, listening to people’s problems and prescribing poems to help them with their anxieties.

I had put an email address in the back of the books published as part of the project, asking readers to send me the poems that inspired them. Instead, I received messages, from all walks of life, looking for poetic inspiration in the loneliest of times. Most of all I received them from people working in the NHS. While we were at home, learning to bake bread, they were in First World War conditions dealing with death every day.

It was with this backdrop that I set out to research and write the third and final part of the Poetry Pharmacy trilogy, The Poetry Pharmacy Forever. I realised in these times we needed poetry more than ever. Lacking the ability to commune or even worship together through those long months, it made me realise, as poetry flooded my social media, that every liturgy of every faith is filled with poetry and, in different times, we used to recite that poetry communally and regularly. In our increasingly secular world, the canon of poetry has become the secular liturgy, with passages of inspiring poetry on every social media platform filling the spiritual void.