This paper has been five years in the making, since I have run a series of seminars about poetry and psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic for non-clinical students. The title comes from a poem by John Berryman , ‘Dream Song 29’ (1964, p. 77), and it sums up how in this seminar we have tried both to feel what we feel in an authentic way when reading a poem, and think about the links it may have with the central core of the students' study, which is psychoanalysis. Are the two disciplines in any way complementary? Can unconscious phantasy be tapped into via the medium of poetry? In this paper I hope to show that while there are profound differences between poetry and psychoanalysis there are also similarities, as the work with students has highlighted. I also include three brief clinical vignettes.