Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services.

He continued to use autism as an "individual tragedy" to "destroy the family", while noting that many people with autism will "never pay taxes, they will never get a job, they will never play baseball, they will never write poetry, they will never write poetry, they will never date."

These words have attracted widespread criticism from researchers, advocacy groups and people with autism. They object to these scientifically inappropriate characteristics of autism, and the widespread stroke of autistic patients described by Kennedy, who exist within a broad range.

As an autistic English professor who studies literature and neurodiversity, Kennedy’s argument is particularly disturbing, and I think many people with autism will never write poetry.

This is far from the facts.

Working poet

The poems written by autistic people are great, and they also write novels, dramas, and almost any conceivable literature. Autistic authors’ autism book project, Project, catalogue 133 poetry collections written by autistic patients, representing only a small part of the creation of autistic poets throughout history.

One of the most famous autistic poets of the present day is David Miedzianik, who also wrote one of the earliest autistic memoirs in 1986. He was in “I hope some women want me to want me to have my poetry after reading all these books”, “eliminate my mind: autobiography and other poetry” and “Now what I have left is myself: autobiography, 1993-1996.”

Adam Wolfond is another famous poet of autism. The non-manifesto Wolfond has released several poetry books, including 2019’s “Other Issues Beyond Autism,” “The Way of Desire,” the second year “The Way of Desire” and “Open Books in Water.” Traci Neal is an autistic poet, advocate and spoken artist whose works have been exhibited in Newsweek and Poetry Moments of NPR.

The autistic poet wrote many topics. But their work is particularly poignant when they discuss how they adapt to a world that often marks them broken, incomplete, or less complete than humans.

The spokesperson for the poem noted in the 2010 poem Misfit by writer and poet Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay that others often exclude him because of 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.

The poets of the past

In addition to living writers, readers and researchers explore the possibility that poets of the past might have autistic traits, even before autism was formalized by clinicians in the mid-20th century.

Of course, be cautious when categorizing people from the past because they live in a world without these terms. Meanwhile, there are always people who work in the way we now describe as autism. Therefore, most literary scholars believe that it is completely reasonable to use it as a possibility, as long as these historical figures are not given a formal, authoritative "diagnosis".

For example, in 2010, literary scholar Julie Brown suggested that the famous American poet Emily Dickinson had characteristics that match some people in the autism spectrum, such as sensory problems, social weirdness and affluent language. Recent readers have agreed.

In fact, many historical poets, novelists and playwrights are associated with autism or other types of neurological disorders, such as William Wadsworth, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Anderson, George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf.

Unique sound, unique perspective

Of course, countless autistic people writing poetry, but these poems are not famous and have not published books. Chris Martin, a neurospread poet and educator who works with autistic people around the world, helps his students discover how to express themselves in poetry.

He describes the work in "May Tomorrow Wake: Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiversity Future," a memoir of Martin's own journey and a collection of poetry anthology from his students' poetry.

Martin describes “sharing with an extraordinary reciprocal poet of autism or autism’s thoughts or autism style.”

He added: “Time and time again, I watched my students…handed the poetry hand and started dancing like they did all their lives.”

In fact, he believes that "the pattern structure of poetry uniquely serves the mind of nerve divergent." Because many autistic patients seek patterns in a "combination of know-how and urgency", reading and writing poetry anchors in patterns of words, images, sounds and forms, especially suits their way of thinking.

"I know there are many poets with various neural differences, which add to the way we see the world in a unique way, which adds to our unique voices, which adds to our unique voices," said Elizabeth R. McClellan, a magazine mother Jones, autism poet, educator and attorney.

In other words, autistic people can expand the possibilities of poetry itself.