“MY MAIN JOB IS TO TRANSLATE / PAIN INTO TALES THEY CAN TOLERATE // IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE”

Abstract

This article examines the contribution that poetry written over the last fifty years might make to the established and burgeoning field of Medical Humanities. It takes poems by women about cancer and depression as a case study of how they can offer insight into the impact of these conditions on the sufferer. Collectively, the poems document and effect shifts in knowledge about, and the associated stigmas concerning, illnesses that carry secrecy and shame, specifically cancer and depression. Additionally, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s remarkable essay “On Being Ill” (1930), we see how the non-verbal features of poems, particularly metaphors and symbols, mark the space of what a patient cannot fully articulate. Accordingly, the poems discussed illuminate how literature can express human interiority but at the same time remind the reader – or health professional – that interiority can never be fully presented. Thus, poetry both contributes to and also checks the ways in which literature is appropriated by the biomedical sciences. The poets included are Eavan Boland, Julia Darling, U.A. Fanthorpe, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Carol Satyamurti and Jo Shapcott. Some poems specify a female subjectivity, some express agency as autonomous individuals, while others presume to speak of common human experience.

Keywords:

• Medical Humanities
• Health Humanities
• poetry
• contemporary women poets
• Virginia Woolf
• Julia Darling
• Gwyneth Lewis
• U.A. Fanthorpe
• Elizabeth Jennings
• Jane Kenyon
• Jackie Kay
• Jo Shapcott
• Eavan Boland
• Carol Satyamurti
• poetry and cancer
• poetry and depression
• Susan Sontag

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Gwyneth Lewis's poem “Consultant,” from Chaotic Angels: Poems in English (Bloodaxe, 2005), and Julia Darling's sonnet “Chemotherapy,” from Sudden Collapses in Public Places (Arc, 2003), are reproduced here by kind permission of the respective publishers. Angelaki's publisher also wishes to thank Carol Satyamurti for permission to feature her poem “How are You?” in this special issue of the journal.

1 Information on Jennings's papers can be found at the Elizabeth Jennings Project, available <http://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/home2.html> (accessed 19 Dec. 2016). See also “Poetry and Personality: The Private Papers and Public Image of Elizabeth Jennings” in The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation, eds. Carrie Smith and Lisa Stead (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) 105–20.

2 Reflection 23, Notebook C, Box 8 (1957–65), Elizabeth Jennings Papers, Washington University Library, St. Louis.