Their artistic vision understandably focused on the most powerful feelings and experiences they had undergone-their own inner struggle with the disease that plagued them, a war which no one else could completely comprehend nor could help them abate. Likewise, their talent did not derive from their disease. No doubt being acutely aware of their own problems and those of the world helped trigger the depression in the Confessional Poets-but their despair was the result of physiological pathology, not the result of an artistic temperament or a considered assessment of reality. And yet, for a while in the later modern age of the 1960’s and 1970’s, some romanticized self-slaughter (currently manifested, perhaps, in self-abuse like “cutting” and “piercing”), as if self-loathing and total pessimism could make one understand life (and death) and could forge one into a competent artist (or pop star). Depression is not what made them write poetry, nor does mental illness become the primary impetus for any other sort of artist. In short, most of these artists killed themselves because they had what we now recognize to be a physiologically-caused disease called clinical depression, not because they were simply too wimpy to abide the whips and scorns of time or a world in disarray. The two are hardly antithetical or mutually exclusive. This observation brings me back to my brother’s conversation with his friend about our desire for happiness versus our desire for knowledge about reality. This research also notes that even the language the suicidal poets employ alludes to their sense of being unable to communicate their inner turmoil to others, an odd dilemma for artists whose medium is highly-nuanced language. What the research concludes is not that the poets who opted for suicide were more in touch with and dismayed by the deterioration of morality in society than their contemporaries-but rather that from the beginning, these personalities demonstrated a pre-occupation with themselves. One revealing study even compared and contrasted the characteristics of the work done by poets who committed suicide with the work of their contemporaries, also confessional poets, who did not. If we equate the art of living with the art of dying, then surely something is amiss here. Immediately we may think of Silvia Plath, who in 1963 stuck her head in a gas oven, or John Berryman who in 1972 jumped from a bridge in Minneapolis, or Anne Sexton who in 1974 turned on the car motor in her closed garage. They sincerely want to die, and they feel it important to let us know what that feels like, possibly so that others who experience the same emotion will not feel so totally isolated or guilty.

They aren’t simply drawing attention to themselves. Whether we believe they have come upon truths so painful that they prefer leaving this life rather than enduring an out-of-kilter world, or whether they are simply too delicate or maimed to withstand the onslaught of inner angst, these poets really do want to die. And among these confessional poets are a number who seemed bent on the art of dying-or at least who devote a significant portion of their art portraying their preoccupation with the desire to achieve non-existence. Artists sometimes tell us we are completely insane, or, more politely, that we are working against our own best interests.īut among artists, especially, it seems, among some modern poets who indulge in exploring the interior of themselves for our benefit, the so-called confessional poets may have the most intense questions for us.

Depression i want to due