The Poetry of Suicide : Lessons in Grief from the Lives and Deaths of Poets.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Welsch, J. T.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Suicide in literature.

Grief in literature.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (300 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2026.

Summary:

A profound exploration of the connection between poetry and suicide. J.T. Welsch interweaves stories of poets who took their own lives with the long history of suicide in his own family, searching for a new way of understanding these difficult deaths. Beginning with Hamlet's 'To be or not to be?', he delves into the work of Dante, Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Mayakovsky and others, asking what it can teach us about suicide's messy reality. Suicide is more like poetry than we realise, Welsch argues. Both are filled with ambiguities, contradictions and unknowable intentions. Both demand and resist interpretation. Recovering the personal dimension often lost in our medicalised public discourse, Welsch finds practical ways of confronting suicide's poem-like difficulties.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Dedication

Prologue: reading and grieving suicide

The question: suicide as poem

The answer: suicide's author

The forest: suicide's readers

Suicide in youth

Suicide in the family

Suicide in later life

The politics of self-sacrifice

Epilogue: living with suicide

Acknowledgements

Further reading

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

ISBN:

1-5261-9198-9

1-5261-9200-4

9781526191984

OCLC:

1579001244