How poetry can sustain us through illness, bereavement and change

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When COVID lockdown loomed back in 2020, many people panic-bought toilet rolls – but I stocked up on notebooks and my favourite pencils.

I had been inspired by the writing of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In Letters to a Young Poet (1929), a collection of ten letters written to a young military cadet who had sent his poetry to Rilke for critique, Rilke advised: “Confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all...