3 Articles-FK

I Bask In Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women This article discusses the connection between mental illness and poets. Among poets with mental illness this article also discusses the fact that it is mainly female poets that have mental illness. The article discusses how people that have mental illness tend to express there feelings more then someone else who does not have mental illness. Poetry attracts people who are willing to express there feelings. The fact that people with mental illness tend to express there feelings more regularly may cause them to gravitate to expressing them on paper through poetry. Poetry may also cause writers to become mentally ill because of the fact readers tend to enjoy the work of poets that seem to be emotionally unstable. The article also discusses how women tend to be more emotionally unstable in fields of work such as poetry. All in all this article was discussing the connection between mental illness and those who write poetry. Sylvia Plath And The Failure Of Emotional Self-Repair Through Poetry The author of this article discusses the life of Sylvia Plath and events that could have led to her having unstable mental state. I liked the fact that the author used Sylvia Plath's on journal entries when going through her life. Reading this helped me better understand how the loss of Plath's father really wore her down emotionally. I feel that growing up with no father figure to guide her was a main reason for her being emotionally unstable. The article also discusses how Plath used poetry to channel some of her emotions. It also discusses that being able to express her emotions freely on paper may have led to Plath developing a case of mental illness. As you can see this article was about the events in Plath's life that may have caused her to develop a mental illness. Sylvia Plath: Fusion With The Victim And Suicide This article was about Sylvia Plath's poems and suicide. The author discusses how some of Plath's poems foreshadowed her eventual suicide. I feel that the author tries to connect Plath's suicide with her ability to freely cope with her emotions through poetry. All in all I believe the author was trying to connect Plath's suicide with the actual words of her poems.

Bask in the Dreams of Suicide VH

I Bask in the Dreams of Suicide:

This article discussed the research that highlights the relationship between mental illness and poets. It was pointed out that scientific research has been done and that research has discovered that many poets suffer from mental illnesses. They also discovered that poetry attracts those with a mental illness and although poetry may help those with a mental illness it may also cause one to obtain a mental illness. Also the research pointed out that woman are caused a great amount of physiological stress from poetry. Overall the idea was that Tendencies of mental illness are greater in artistic fields of work.

3 article -WR-

The article “Sylvia Plath : Fusion with the victim and suicide” is about Sylvia Plath’s life and related her life to the poem that she wrote for better understanding her life. The author of the article has hypothesis that a poet who wrote about and committed suicide, a series of assumption concerning the relationship between the failure of the defense of identification with the aggressor and a tendency toward self-destruction. To support the hypothesis, the author uses some lines or stanzas from Sylvia Plath poem. This article is somewhat hard to understand and take long time to finish reading because sometime I don’t get the same feeling that the author get. However, the article helps me a lot to understand Sylvia Plath life and the reason of her suicide.
“I Bask In Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women” . The purpose of the article is to explore possible reasons for the high rate of mental illness among female poets. The authors also give some examples of the linkage between creativity and mental illness, especially in the domain of poetry and among female poets. In the article Sylvia Plath is introduced as an example of a female eminent poet who committed suicide.
“Sylvia Plath And The Failure Of Emotional Self-repair Through Poetry” This article is about Sylvia Plath’s life. The author tries to find the reason why Sylvia Plath committed suicide and what effect her decision. In the article introduce two important events that effect Sylvia’s decision. The first event was Sylvia’s mother’s visiting to England possibly stirring up her old fears of her father. And the second event was Sylvia’s husband’s affair with another woman.

Articles - Jeet

I bask in dreams of suicide:

1. Empirical studies have established a link between mental illness and creative writers/artists; female poets in particular
2. Poetry attracts more expressive, emotional, "narrative", "legislative" thinkers who are more prone to instability. Depressed women tend to ruminate more than men and writing may have a deleterious effect. The personal nature of poetry attracts emotionally disturbed women looking for an outlet.
   
3. Poetry may not have the same benefits as other creative writing and might adversely impact the artist's internal locus of control, and therefore his or her self esteem. Female poets in particular tend to attribute their accomplishments to an external agent such as a muse.
4. The "gatekeepers" of poetry may have ingrained expectations about the personal nature of a female poet's work and therefore may view the works of emotionally unstable female poets in a more favorable light.
5. Mental illness is more prevalent in the young population and compared to artists and professionals in other fields, poets tend to peak earlier in their lives.
6. Female poets in western society might struggle more than men to deal with the higher expectations that accompany creative success.

The failure of emotional self repair through poetry

1. The dualities - a)Writing for an audience and writing for personal reasons. b) Destructive and constructive activity within writing. c) Fantasy and pretense as opposed to reality. d) Interplay and harmony between content and form
2. In Plath's later years, the emotionally devastating experiences of her life, coupled with her unstable mental state and her narcissistic withdrawal from the world led to her abandoning her controlled traditional style of composing poetry. She adopted a more a much more personal style that let her feelings run loose, only heightening her inner turmoil.

The Fusion of the victim and suicide
I'm not sure if i understand the article. The implication seems to be that Plath's poetry gave her a venue to vent her rage and control her swirling mass of ambivalent emotions. However, in her later years, the creative force weakened and the absence of this coping mechanism led her to kill herself. (?)

KaufmanBaer Women are not at a disadvantage to men when in the literary world. However, while writing seems to be the most prevalent area for great success and recognition also carries the burden of a high rate of mental illness more than men and women as a whole. There seems to be a link between women writers, mostly of fiction and poetry, and mental illness. There have been studies that have shown that women creative writers are more likely to have a mental illness and increased levels of depression. These studies have also shown that of the artistic professions poets are more likely to be bipolar than fiction writers and playwrights. There are any reasons given to explain why it is female poets who are usually the most likely to be mentally ill. The reasons are that poetry is the type of art that mentally unstable are most drawn to, poetry does not alleviate mental illness, and that poets peak at a young age which is when most mental illness strikes. Another possibility is that the linguistic style of poetry may appeal more to the mentally ill than other forms of art or writing. A reason given to explain why females are more likely to suffer from mental illness is because they write about more personal things than men poets. Also women creative writers suffer from more stress than men, which is another cause for mental illness. SP Fusion Victim “Fusion with the victim” is a term to describe people with a regressive vicissitude of identification with the aggressor. The article talks about the life of Sylvia Plath and mentions the death of her father when she was 8. It also mentions a poem written by Matthew Arnold that was read to her by her mother. The poem was the jumpstart of her writing career because she began to write poems shortly after. In college she used her father’s red leather thesaurus to write her poetry in. The writer then tries to use Plath’s works to understand her thinking and her suicide. The writer cites many of her poems to show how she is feeling when she was writing a line or what she was intending to mean when she wrote it. Most examples were of poems talking about her father. He says that she was putting herself and ideas of suicide in her writing to temporarily get it out of her system. SP Emotional Repair Poetry needs a certain criteria to be truly successful. There are four sets of overlapping dualities that explain how the writer used everything from the tone to the poet’s own personal tendencies. One of these is the balance of wanting to write for an audience and wanting to write for your own personal reasons. The second is the balance of destructive and constructive activity the writer is using within and while writing the poem. The third includes the interplay between pretense and fantasy dictating one part and the other part of it is the poet’s acceptance of reality. The fourth and final duality in effect when writing a successful poem is the ability to create a harmonious interplay between primary and secondary process mechanisms. The article then begins to talk about Sylvia Plath by saying her life was a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to make use of literary talent to resolve the powerful, unconscious, emotional conflicts of a severe narcissistic and depressive disturbance. Her father died when she was 8 which she was never able to fully understand or accept. Despite being smart she had a painful adolescence. She made a serious attempt at suicide shortly after receiving a one month guest editorship at Mademoiselle. After returning to school she met Ted Hughes who she later married. Her turning point of her work occurred in 1959 because of a combination of doubt and trouble within her personal life. She had resumed psychotherapy again until she went to England with Ted Hughes that December. In February of 1961 she suffered a miscarriage, which was followed by an appendectomy a month later. Then in January of 1962 she gave birth to her son and after this she began to write many poems. She wrote very little between the end of 1956 to early 1960. In the summer of 1962 her mother comes to visit bringing back bad memories. This combined with Hughes leaving her for another woman in late 1962 seemed to be her breaking point. A few months later she wrote her last poem, 6 days before her suicide.

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"

3 Articles - R. Abbott

'I Bask in the Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women' This article basically stated taht mental illnesses plague female poets far more than either male poets or other women in general. Through scientifically conducted research, it was deduced that creative writers had significantly higher rates of mental illness - labeled the 'Sylvia Plath' effect. It was explained that mental illness was more prone to [female] poets because the type of people that are drawn to poetry to begin with are sometimes unstable and then the prolem worsens when poetry itself is unable to solve their problems. Research has also shown that writing can be very therapeutic, but the value of writing poetry is less clear. An interesting note from the article was that suicidal poets were found to use the first person singular more often than a control group. More specific to females, the reason why they are more mentally unstable is that as they produce high levels of work and expectations increase, they feel more stressed than males. 'Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self-Repair Through Poetry' The author listed three dualities in her poetry: (1) balance between creative individual's use of the audience to serve her own narcissistic interests; (2) balance between destructive and constructive activity; (3) interplay between pretense and fantasy on the one hand and the acceptance of reality on the other. In a biographically portion of the article, Plath's adolescence was described as very painful and difficult, despite having great academic success. An interesting note about her first meeting with Ted Hughes was how she bit his cheek, drawing blood, and giving herself crashing, fighting to him. The articles also acknowledged the fact that Plath recognized that powerful destructive force wtihin herself through her poetry. Several tragic disasters which re-surface in her poetry were the death of her father, her miscarriage, her suicide attempts, and Ted Hughes cheating on her. It was said that the loss of Hughes was the final blow in Plath's short life. 'Sylvia Plath: Fusion with the Victim and Suicide' This was easily the most difficult of the three articles to make complete sense of. A revealing Plath quote in the reading was, "...it's quite amazing how i've gone around for most of my life as in the rarified atmosphere under a bell jar," stated well before she ever wrote he book. The author's hypothesis linked suicidal behavior (like Plath's), Christ-like empathy for victims, and poetic sensibility. The author also believed that Plath's poetry abled her to vent her rage for a brief period of time, but it would all come back once she completed the writing. It was also stated that, while reading Plath's poem chronologically, the forces opposing death as constuctively dealt with until in the last few, where this force weakens and dies - along with Plath herself.