That there are many congruencies between poetry and psychoanalysis has long been recognised. Finding symbolic forms for elusive and possibly as-yet-unknown emotions or psychic states—what Shakespeare described as giving to ‘airy nothing’ a ‘local habitation and a name’ (A Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i, ll. 16-17)—is a process shared by poets and psychoanalysts alike, each reaching for the meaning that may become evident to those who are ‘Willing to work and to be wrought upon’ (Wordsworth, ‘The Prelude’, XIII, l. 100).

The poet seeks to re-evoke the intensity of a feeling, to engage with the meaning of human life, with matters of value, of emotion and experience. As Susan Langer says, the poem's distinguishing