U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently declared autism a national “epidemic,” calling it a “preventable disease” that is growing at an “alarming rate.”
He went on to cast autism as an “individual tragedy” that “destroys families,” while stating that many autistic people will “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date.”
The remarks drew widespread criticism from researchers, advocacy groups and autistic people. They objected to these scientifically unsound characterizations of autism, along with the broad strokes with which Kennedy described autistic people, who exist on a vast spectrum.
As an autistic English professor who studies literature and neurodiversity, I was especially unnerved by Kennedy’s contention that many autistic people will never write poetry.
It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Working poets
There’s a remarkable corpus of poetry written by autistic people, who have also written novels, plays and virtually any kind of literature imaginable. The Autism Books by Autistic Authors Project catalogs 133 collections of poetry authored by autistic individuals, which represents only a fraction of the work created by autistic poets throughout history.
One of the most well-known contemporary autistic poets is David Miedzianik, who in 1986 also wrote one of the earliest autistic memoirs. He’s published his poetry in the books “I Hope Some Lass Will Want Me After Reading All This,” “Taking the Load Off My Mind: Autobiographical and Other Poems” and “Now All I’ve Got Left is Myself: Autobiographical Poems, 1993-1996.”
Adam Wolfond is another celebrated autistic poet. Wolfond, who is nonspeaking, has released several books of poetry, including “In Way of Music Water Answers Toward Questions Other Than What Is Autism” in 2019, “The Wanting Way” in 2022 and “Open Book in Ways of Water” the following year. And Traci Neal is an autistic poet, advocate and spoken-word artist whose work has been featured in Newsweek and NPR’s Poetry Moment.
Autistic poets write about many topics. But their work is particularly poignant when discussing how they fit into a world that often labels them broken, incomplete or something less than human.
In writer and poet Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay’s 2010 poem “Misfit,” the speaker of the poem notes that other people often ostracize him for his differences. But he doesn’t care:
My hands, as usual, were flapping
The birds knew I was Autistic;
They found no wrong with anything.
Poets from the past
Beyond living writers, readers and researchers have also explored the possibility that poets from the past may have had autistic characteristics, even before autism came to be formally theorized by clinicians in the mid-20th century.
Of course, it’s important to exercise caution when categorizing people from the past, since they lived in worlds without those terms. At the same time, there have always been people whose minds and bodies worked in ways we’d now describe as autistic. So most literary scholars believe it is perfectly reasonable to discuss it as a possibility, as long as these historical figures aren’t given a formal, authoritative “diagnosis.”
In 2010, for example, literary scholar Julie Brown suggested that renowned American poet Emily Dickinson had characteristics – such as sensory issues, social quirkiness and a savant’s command of language – that align with those of some individuals on the autism spectrum. More recent readers have agreed.
In fact, many historical poets, novelists and playwrights have been tentatively associated with autism or other kinds of neurodivergence, such as William Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf.
Unique voices, unique perspectives
Of course, there are countless autistic people who write poetry who aren’t famous and haven’t published books. Neurodivergent poet and educator Chris Martin, who works with autistic people around the world, helps his students discover how to express themselves in poems.
He describes this work in “May Tomorrow Be Awake: On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future,” a book that’s part memoir of Martin’s own journey and part poetry anthology of his students’ poetry.
Martin describes the “remarkable reciprocity poetry shares with autism or autistic minds or autistic ways of moving through the world.”
“Time and again,” he adds, “I have watched my students … grasp the hand of poetry and begin dancing like they’ve been doing it their whole lives.”
In fact, he argues that “poetry’s patterned structure uniquely serves neurodivergent thinking.” Because many autistic people seek patterns with a “combination of knack and urgency,” reading and writing poetry, which is anchored in patterns of words, images, sounds and forms, is particularly well suited for their way of thinking.
In a recent interview with the magazine Mother Jones, autistic poet, educator and attorney Elizabeth R. McClellan said, “I know so many poets with various kinds of neurodivergence and that adds to the way that we see the world in our unique way, and that adds to our unique voice as poets.”
In other words, autistic people are able to expand the possibilities of poetry itself.
