Poetry and COVID-19: the benefit of poetry and the poetryandcovidarchive.com website to mental health and wellbeing

Abstract

From June 2020 to June 2021, the website poetryandcovid.com (now archived as poetryandcovidarchive.com) served as a platform for poetic responses by people from around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. The site featured 1000+ poems by 600+ poets and received c. 100,000 views by people from 128 countries. The poetry, their author’s testimonials, as well as “comments” submitted to the organisers and public website, expressed how people felt during the pandemic. In the project’s final three months, the website hosted a survey adapted from the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS), targeted at understanding the value of poetry, in general, and the website, in particular, to mental health and wellbeing. 400 people took part, 373 completed the WEMWBS, and over 250 participants provided “final comments”. The results show that the writing and reading of poetry – as well as the website itself – were of considerable benefit to mental health and wellbeing.