The Role of Poetry as Creative Art Therapy: A Cognitive Semiotic Analysis of 'Her"

Abstract

As a therapeutic art form, this research examines poetry through a cognitive semiotic analysis of Pierre Alex Jeanty’s Her, Volume II (2017). With the increasing number of mental health problems, such as anxiety, trauma, and depression, there is a growing need for new artistic traditions of therapy. This paper aims to analyze how lexical and syntactic choices in Pierre Alex Jeanty’s Her, Volume II, construct denotative and connotative meanings in the selected poems, in accordance with Barthes’ framework of textual meaning. It also aims to investigate how verbal and visual semiotic resources, including metaphors and imagery, interact to convey meanings related to emotional resilience, self-awareness, and therapeutic engagement, from a cognitive semiotic perspective. Using the denotation and connotation analysis by Roland Barthes (1967) and the visual metaphor analysis by Forceville (2009), this paper will analyze two verbal texts and two visual images to demonstrate how meaning is created through the combination of both verbal and visual components. This study finds that in Jeanty’s poetry, metaphors are used to add a positive spin to trauma, the address form “you” is used to create intimacy, and simple words are used symbolically.