This article uses Elizabethan poetics and the Renaissance sonnet as a template for understanding the power of reading as it is exhibited in modern-day mental health contexts, specifically in the work of national charity The Reader. Our concern is with the medicine of verbal beauty, representative expression and formal ordering towards perfection--in particular, the relation of "erected wit" and "infected will" in Sidney's Defence of Poetry. We examine reading group transcripts produced as part of research projects on reading and mental health conducted by the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool (where the authors are based). We demonstrate how Elizabethan poetry, precisely by not offering a form of directive or targeted therapy, has the potential to help ease the suffering of those whose personal and existential problems are too often ignored by conventional therapies because "incurable" as such.