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This paper aims to examine the extent to which poetry therapy enables students to create a space for making meanings for themselves. Until now, most of traditional classrooms for teaching English literature have taught “the only” authoritative interpretation regarding a text. Furthermore, having emphasized text close reading, English department needs to rethink its position and role in a contemporary society where our students plunge into. For this study, the data were gathered through the “before” and “after” questionnaires of 41 students taking an English literature class. Executing reliability, frequency, and correlation analyses, I found out that mechanisms such as identification and defamiliarization engaged in poetry therapy promote students’ self-awareness and considering their relations to family members and others. Also poetry therapy utilizes creative writing in order to re-symbolize what a reader reads in a text. The findings suggest that students see creative writing about the text helpful for their self-awareness and relations with others. Poetry therapy is a valuable technique in teaching English literature for the purpose of emphasizing the importance of readers, not the text itself.