This dissertation aims to show how an emotional situation of the depressivemelancholic type (the inner world in ruins) is transformed into poetry; how emotional factors of a poet`s personality are organized in a given moment and in a given context leading or compelling him to the process of poetic creation. Poets like Manuel Bandeira, Dante Milano, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Poe, Gilberto Mendonça Teles, T. S. Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges are taken as starting points.In this study, art is understood as Susanne Langer proposed in Feeling and form: Art is the creation of symbolic forms of human feeling. Art`s creative process can also be seen as a symbolic form whereby conscience organizes and expresses the emotional experience. The focus of this thesis converges on the creative process, in the tension between the emotional ruin and the linguistic resources employed by the poet in organizing his interior chaos. Underlying the psychological desintegration or non-integration, there is a deep layer that demands order and shapes the emotional chaos. The poet must act on the basis of his experience, feel it intensely but, at the same time move away from it in a reflexive way; he must separate the subject who suffers the experience from the mind who thinks and creates the poem. Bearing this in mind, the study displays a strongly psychological colour.