The article was talking about a study done on the language of poems and how that correlated with suicide in any way. It used poems of poets who had committed suicide and was also testing two suicide models by analyzing text. This also pointed out that suicide rates are higher among poets than authors in other literary fields and the general population. Their are certain words that seem to be a trend in the writing of poets who commit suicide such as I, me, and my being used heavily. Also, there was a trend of suicide among poets who wrote more about death and lust as well.
Anne Sexton's poetry did have many hintings towards suicide but I feel she used her writing as a coping mechanism just like her close friend Sylvia Plath. However, just like Plath eventually neither of them were able to handle living in this world and took their own lives. Poetry was a release for them because they clearly had something unstable or wrong either in their minds or in their lives and poetry allowed them to express themselves in ways they could not in person. I believe that poetry also contributed to their suicides because it allowed them to get through situations without getting real help. They could only express their anger they could never confront the problems head on in their lives and caused the eventual breakdown of their mental health to the point where they took their own lives.
I feel that when reading poems written by Anne Sexton it is easy to make the connection that she is suicidal. However, I am not sure that I could have concluded that she committed suicide just by reading her poetry. She is very talented but it seems that her mental instability which was apparent in her poetry eventually wore her down. It would be interesting to see how different her life would have been without poetry.
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