The poetry of suicide

A profound exploration of the connection between poetry and suicide. ‘Suicides have a special language’, Anne Sexton wrote in her 1964 poem ‘Wanting to Die’. But is it a language we can learn to read? In The poetry of suicide, J. T. Welsch interweaves stories of poets who took their own lives with the long history of suicide in his own family, searching for a new way of understanding these difficult deaths. Beginning with Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be?’, he delves into the work of Dante, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, asking what it can teach us about suicide’s messy reality. Suicide is more like poetry than we realise, Welsch argues. Both are filled with ambiguities, contradictions and unknowable intentions. Both demand and resist interpretation. Recovering the personal dimension often lost in our medicalised public discourse, Welsch finds practical ways of confronting suicide’s poem-like difficulties.