Researching material for inclusion in 'Writers from the Vault' (2RPH Monday 6.30pm) leads me down a lot of rabbit holes. If I can't find what I am looking for, then I will always find something else. And that something else leads on again. I enjoy the process after the initial frustration passes.

Yesterday I was at the 'Victorian Web' page and found a long essay* about Christina Rossetti. Of course, I was off topic by a mile, but it held my attention because the piece in hand was looking at aspects of poetry theory, specifically tractarian ideas on the subject. (The tractarians were a movement in the Anglican Church which pushed for the return to certain old rites of worship to be reinstated.) 

The essay notes that,

Poetry can provide "a solace for the mind broken by the sufferings and disappointments of actual life; and it becomes, moreover, the utterance of the inward emotion of a right moral feeling, seeking a purity and a truth which this world will not give" (English Poetic Theory, Warren)

Another commentator has explained, "the inner emotion that is purged is not so much pity and terror as a yearning for something beyond." That yearning is the theological analogue, we might say, of Wordsworth's "something evermore about to be." "Poetry has its source in a powerful emotion natural to all men, an emotion that rises up to seek expression and in expression finds relief. That emotion is religious: it is the desire to know God." 

Both are interesting points. Even if you leave aside the religious aspects, the idea of poetry as being a 'solace for the broken mind' seems very true to me. I write some poetry, a paltry output really, but the sense that I am writing something out of myself as a kind of purging seems truthful.

*Pre-Raphaelite Aestheticism and Pre-Raphaelite Sacramentalism in the Poetry of Christina Rossetti
Anthony H. Harrison, Professor of English, North Carolina State University