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   Gök Ekin | Salı, Aralık 25, 2007, 23:05

   RESEARCH SEEKS ANSWER TO A POET DYING YOUNG

   Poets often find death fascinating, and now one psychologist suggests a connection: While writers on the whole die young, poets die even younger.

   A new movie biography of Sylvia Plath reinforces the image of the poet as meteorite, flashing brightly — and briefly — across the sky before burning out. Plath, who committed suicide at age 31, typified the short lives of other notable poets like John Keats, who died of tuberculosis at 26, or Hart Crane, who ended his life at 33.

   James C. Kaufman, Ph.D., of California State University at San Bernardino, writing in a recent issue of the journal Death Studies, combed through biographical reference works to find birth and death dates for 1,987 poets, playwrights, novelists and non-fiction writers from North America, China, Turkey and Eastern Europe. He then sorted the results by region, gender and literary specialty.

   On average, non-fiction writers lived 67.9 years, novelists lived 66.0 years and playwrights 63.4 years. Poets averaged only 62.2 years. The rankings were similar for both male and female writers, although the women in each category outlived the men.

   “Both male and female poets had the shortest life spans of all four types of writers, and poets had the shortest life spans in three of the four cultures,” Kaufman says. Only in Eastern Europe did poets squeak past playwrights by a few months, and that difference was not statistically significant.

   What accounts for these variations in longevity? Kaufman advances several possible reasons. Poets may die younger because they are more likely to suffer from mental illness, especially depression, which is a risk factor for suicide.

   “Poetry may appeal to people who are more likely to be self-destructive,” he says.

   “I think Professor Kaufman is way off course,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who so far has lived five months longer than the average poet. “The assumed association of poets with mental disorders and depression is a romantic holdover.”

   Collins has his own hypothesis. “If poets really do die sooner than other writers — and notice it’s not that much sooner — they do so because of the nature of poetry,” says Collins, a professor at Lehman College, City University of New York, in an e-mail interview. “Because poems are briefer (to say the least) than novels, books of non-fiction and plays, the poet frequently is returned to zero. He faces the blank page on an almost daily basis. Thus the poet experiences more literary stress than writers in other genres. And we know the connection between stress and mortality.”

   “The fact that a Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton may die young doesn’t necessarily mean an Introduction to Poetry class should carry a warning that poems may be hazardous to one’s health,” Kaufman says. The research, however, may stimulate poets and mental health professionals find ways to lessen the occasional negative impact of writing poetry, he says.

   Other researchers have said that poets who ultimately commit suicide may leave clues in their writings.

   In poems written throughout their careers, suicidal poets used significantly more first-person singular self-references (“I,” “me,” “my”) and fewer first-person plural words than non-suicidal poets did, researchers Shannon W. Stirman and James W. Pennebaker wrote in 2001. They also tended to decrease their use of communication words (such as “talk,” “share” and “listen”) over time, while non-suicidal poets displayed an opposing trend. For more information about the Stirman and Pennebaker study, see.

   Kaufman points out that poetry is lonely work. Non-fiction writers interact with sources or editors and playwrights deal with actors and directors, implying healthy contact with other human beings. Poets (at least in legend) scribble alone in unheated garrets, susceptible to both loneliness and infection.

   Or perhaps the statistics mask the reality that poets produce more of their lifetime output when young, compared to other writers. Thus, they become notable enough to show up in reference books despite early deaths.

   One poet, A. E. Housman, who died at 77, wrote immortally in “To an Athlete Dying Young” that there is some advantage to such a fate:
   “ Smart lad, to slip betimes away
   From fields where glory does not stay,
   And early though the laurel grows
   It withers quicker than the rose.”

   Signs Of Suicidal Tendencies Found Hidden In Dead Poets’ Writings

   An analysis of the use of certain words may uncover hidden signs of suicidal tendencies in writers of poetry, according to new research.

   “Suicidal poets are more detached from others and more preoccupied with themselves,” says Shannon Wiltsey Stirman, M.A., of the University of Pennsylvania. “Our research also illustrates how text analysis can reveal characteristics of writing that may be associated with suicide and therefore could be useful in predicting suicide among poets.”

   Stirman and co-author James W. Pennebaker, Ph.D., of the University of Texas at Austin, note that suicide rates are much higher among poets than among other literary writers and the general population, although most poets do not commit suicide. Many suicidal poets suffer from some form of depressive disorder throughout their lives, however.

   The poets who ultimately committed suicide also used more words associated with death than did the non-suicide group.

   The study is published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine

   Using text-analysis software, researchers compared words used in 156 poems written by nine poets who committed suicide to words used in 135 poems written by nine poets who did not commit suicide.

   The suicidal and non-suicidal poets were matched as closely as possible by nationality, era, education and sex. All were American, British, or Russian.

   In poems written throughout their careers, the poets who committed suicide used significantly more first-person singular self-references (such as “I,” “me” and “my”) and fewer first-person plural words than did the non-suicidal poets.

   In addition, the suicidal poets tended to decrease their use of communication words (such as “talk,” “share” and “listen”) over time, while the non-suicidal poets tended to increase their use of such words.

   Suicidal poets selected for the study were John Berryman, Hart Crane, Sergei Esenin, Adam L. Gordon, Randall Jarrell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sylvia Plath, Sarah Teasdale and Anne Sexton. The were matched to non-suicidal poets including Matthew Arnold, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joyce Kilmer, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Adrienne Rich and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

   The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health.