Panic Attacks
Put the reader inside four racing minutes and bring them out the other side.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about panic attacks: breath, pace and syntax techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus prompts in this free guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
A panic attack is a poem-sized event: it begins, crests and passes inside minutes, yet contains a whole catastrophe. Writing it well means capturing its strange double reality, a body convinced it is dying in a supermarket queue where absolutely nothing is wrong. That gap between inner emergency and outer calm is the theme's engine, and the poems that work keep both channels open at once: the fluorescent aisle stays ordinary while the heart declares the end of the world.
The theme is also a masterclass in pacing. Panic distorts time, floods the senses and shreds logical sequence, so the poem's syntax, line lengths and breath become the honest instruments. A panic poem is one of the few places where the form can do most of the telling: short gasping lines, a sentence that will not end, a stanza break like a held breath.
Why poets return to it
Poets write panic because it is common, invisible and humiliatingly hard to explain. Telling someone "I couldn't breathe in a car park" invites blank looks; a poem can make the listener's own chest tighten, which is the only real explanation. For readers who know the experience, such poems dissolve shame; for those who do not, they build understanding no pamphlet manages.
The subject also rewards technical daring, which contest judges notice. Writory scores structure and language alongside emotion, and panic poems succeed or fail almost entirely on those two: the feeling is a given, but the pacing that recreates it is pure craft.
Where it comes from
Emily Dickinson mapped this territory before it had a clinical name. In "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (published 1896) she staged mental collapse as a funeral service inside the skull, with mourners treading until sense broke through, and her dashes still read like recorded gasps. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his so-called terrible sonnets of the 1880s, wrote dread as cliffs of the mind, sheer and no-man-fathomed.
The twentieth century brought the racing first person: Sylvia Plath's speakers accelerate and overheat, and Anne Sexton wrote anxiety with domestic props and terrible clarity. More recently, spoken word performance, Sabrina Benaim's widely shared piece on explaining depression to a mother among the best known, has made breath and audible pacing the theme's native technology.
The elements that carry it
- Ordinary public settings, checkouts, trains, meetings, sharpen the contrast between outward calm and inner alarm.
- Breath and heart imagery works best measured and physical, counted exhales, a pulse in the ears, rather than poetic hearts aflame.
- Distorted perception, sound arriving from far away, lights too bright, hands not one's own, renders dissociation truthfully.
- Small anchoring objects, a cold coin gripped, five things named, a friend's voice on the phone, give the poem its route back out.
- Time markers, a clock that crawls, an announcement heard twice, dramatise panic's warping of minutes into hours.
Techniques that work
- Shorten lines as panic climbs, down to two or three syllables at the peak, then let them lengthen as breath returns; the poem's shape becomes a breathing exercise.
- Run one unpunctuated sentence across many enjambed lines to enact racing thought, then stop it with a hard full stop where the wave breaks.
- Keep the setting relentlessly ordinary and undistorted while the speaker's perception bends; the calm background makes the storm legible.
- Use present tense throughout the attack and past tense after it, so the grammar itself marks survival.
- Borrow grounding rituals as structure: a poem built on five things seen, four heard, three touched carries its own de-escalation inside it.
Mistakes to avoid
- Reaching for storm, tsunami and drowning metaphors. They are the theme's greeting cards; the fluorescent supermarket detail frightens more than any weather.
- Explaining the panic's cause mid-poem. Attacks rarely announce reasons; a poem that pauses for backstory loses the very breathlessness it needs.
- Ending at the worst moment. Panic passes, that is its one mercy, and a poem that ends inside the peak leaves a false and airless picture.
- Making the speaker heroic or ashamed. Both are commentary; the strong poem simply reports, and lets the reader supply the compassion.
An exercise
Write a fifteen-line poem in which lines one to five shrink steadily in length, lines six to ten are fragments of two or three words, and lines eleven to fifteen grow long and calm again. Set it somewhere mundane and let the shape carry the attack.
A challenge
Write two companion poems: the first from inside a panic attack on a crowded platform, the second from the point of view of the stranger who noticed and stayed. Let one image, a coat button, a dropped ticket, appear in both.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem that takes place entirely between two floors in a lift, in which the speaker practises a counting ritual while the numbers above the door refuse to change fast enough.
Before you submit
- Line length and punctuation change measurably between the poem's calm and its peak.
- The setting is specific, mundane and never distorted for effect.
- No storm, wave or drowning metaphor survives into the final draft.
- The poem includes a route back: breath, an anchor object, a counted list.
- Tense or form marks the difference between during and after.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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