Abstract

Abstract:

Since the Romantic era, the lyrical poem has epitomized the idea of poetic loneliness. While the alleged loneliness epidemic, considered a pervasive mental health problem in Western societies, brings to the fore solitude’s dangerous potential, poems such as Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong” and Cummings’s “l(a” attest to solitude’s aesthetic potential. Ambiguously based on the myth of the solitary genius standing out from the lonely crowd of alienated, other-directed persons, poems may give meaning to the state of psychosocial isolation. Reflecting solitude as a privation, poetic loneliness has the power to create virtual communities.

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