Poetry, later life learning and productive aging reconsidered: An integrative literature review of poetry in the lives of older adults

This integrative literature review examines the place of poetry in the lives of older people aged sixty and above, in community education settings such as the University of the Third Age and as a private practice, responding to deficit views of aging that frame later life through decline, dependency and loss. Screening 1,351 records across six databases and eight journals, it synthesizes a corpus of 89 works classified by evidential proximity, distinguishing the seventeen direct studies of poetry with older adults from research on cognate practices, and appraising each direct study individually. Drawing across educational gerontology, creative aging, poetry therapy, lifelong learning and narrative identity scholarship, it argues that poetry is not merely a leisure activity or therapeutic adjunct but a distinctive mode of later life learning through which older adults interpret experience, sustain agency and produce knowledge about aging. That distinctiveness is located in four formal properties of the poem: compression, rhythm, metaphor and ambiguity. In doing so it reconsiders productive aging, relocating productivity from economic contribution to interpretive and relational making. It proposes the Poetic Aging Framework as a provisional heuristic, organized around four dimensions, memory, voice, connection and becoming, and builds the relations, tensions and boundary conditions among them into the model itself. Evidence is moderate for memory and voice and limited for connection and becoming, so the framework describes possibilities, not demonstrated benefits.