3 articles - BK

I Bask in Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women discusses the linkage between mental illnesses and creative writes namely poets. Within poets, there is a bigger connection between female poets having mental illnesses over male poets. It goes on to describe many studies that have proven this correlation.

"The tendency toward being more expressive

may make one more prone to illness."

i think the people who are prone to illness are more expressive, not the other way around.

"Ludwig’s

(1998) investigation of more than 1,000 people

in 18 different professions showed that people

who pursued professions that were more objective and formal were less likely to be mentally

unstable"

again, I think that makes sense but it is probably the other way around.

There are way too many assumptions in this article, and facts that are used to argue for a point, that while true, don't relate to the point being argued.

I agree with this " People who may be more likely to suffer

from mental illness may be more drawn to writing poetry"

That pretty much sums it up right there.

One thing this article did not discuss is the fact that many people who are poets are introverted, and spend a lot of time by themselves, perhaps this could cause mental illness? Again this could be the other way too, people have the mental illness therefore spend time by themselves, and then since they are by themselves, and probably bored, they right poetry to express how they feel. Maybe because they don't get enough time talking to other people about their feelings, I'm not sure.

It may be found more often in women due to their schism between their personal life and duties to raise a family and be a certain image in society. Creative writing isn't exactly looked at as a viable option for women and that may contribute to the feelings they deal with.

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Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self Repair discusses her life through her prose, poetry, and journals. Silverman and Will go chronologically through her life, discussing major events that happened as well as interjecting with her journals, which I found most interesting. She was quite cognisant of what was going on within her head, and even alludes to the difficulties of growing up with no fatherly influence to teach her things like science. It discusses the transition that she made within her poetry, and how that transition coincided with the progression of her mental illness. It is said that her poetry allowed her to control something, which was a break from the chaos she dealt with in her head. They also discuss her possible inability to have children playing a role in her losing it, which I didn't get because she had children.

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Sylvia Plath: Fusion with the Victim and Suicide:

Orgel discusses a lot about Plath's life, and I wasn't aware that she started writing poetry so early, 8 or 9 years old.

I found it interesting that in college she used her father's red leather thesaurus to write poetry. I'm surprised that she would keep that and almost use him to do that. She recalled her father's "perfect" timing.

I don't understand a lot of what this means. page 273 2nd and 3rd paragraph

Orgel believes that a lot of it does go back to the untimely death of her father at a pivotal stage of development.

This article mainly discusses a lot of her poems and how the poem explained an aspect of her life

We should look at the bottom of pg 283 to 284 and discuss that. There is some statement about why she killed herself and letting the aggressor object and victim merge... I just don't get it. Whenever I read stuff like this I always feel like saying, "yeah that makes sense, because you are looking back on it and connecting the dots, but what if it had nothing to do with that"