Crazy Poets

I have come to appreciate poetry in the past six months. I always liked writing it to some degree, but it has never been my strength. Trying to read poetry was even more difficult for me. After being introduced to poetry on the college level in my Intro to lit class last April, I am now learning about it on a deeper level in my Literary analysis classes. It is strange, because I am using the same book as my last literature class and reading many of the same poems, but they continue to get better with every read, because they are so complex. We can easily spend one class period on one poem (We have done it once or twice), but due to time restrictions we try to dabble in two to three poems per class. I am preparing to do a short paper on a poem and after rereading Sylvia Plath's mirror and hearing her friend, Anne Sexton mentioned in the movie I just watched, Running With Scissors, I decided to look up some information about both poets. I plan to pick one of their poems to do my paper on. I found this heartbreaking article from our on-line library. It totally changed my high-school ideas about these "boring poets" we had to learn about and try to write papers about. I am amazed at how all of the famous poets seem to be connected with other poets and were inspired by many of the same poets.

In high school we had to pick a modern poet to do a paper on. I chose James Wright. Lisa still makes fun of me, because I told her I didn't like nature poetry. I thought it was boring. I asked her to help me analyze some of Wright's poems that I liked, and she laughed and told me they were all about nature. I remember her telling me that her son chose to do his on Sylvia Plath, which concerned her because he was depressed. I asked why the concern and she explained Plath's dark poetry and eventual suicide. The name stuck with me. In my report I learned James Wright had an affair with Anne Sexton. Anne Sexton and Plath were close competitors and friends.

This article is focusing on a particular mental hospital in Boston. The hospital has inspired many forms of literature. The author of the book "Girl, Interrupted" gained her experiences at this hospital. Plath first entered the hospital in her senior year in college due to severe suicidal depression. She had struggled with depression on and off all through college, and after a couple attempts to kill herself they sent her for help. They gave Plath isulin shock treatment. It has a quote from her doctor talking about her depression in retrospect that says, "She was totally depressed, and she wasn't getting any better." They eventually decided on electroshock therapy, despite Plath already having some bad experiences with it that had caused one suicide attempt. After three shock treatments she was well enough to be released. Then the poor mental health of Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. I remember Ezra Pound from my freshman year poetry anthlology. I can still recite the poem by memory, although I don't remember the title.

The article gets more and more heartbreaking as they begin to talk about Anne Sexton's depression, suicide attempts, and recovery that sounds so promising. She was teaching poetry at the mental hospital inspiring many mentally ill patients to write. One of the former patients said she was, "very pretty and very nervous." A former patient, Eleanor Morris', account of her suicide is painful even to read,

"Morris still remember being awakend by her clock radio on Saturday, October 5th, 1974. A newsreader announced that the poet Anne Sexton had died. 'It just said she had died, but I knew she had committed suicide, and I spent the whole moring crying[...] Morris still has an autographed book of hers called, "Live or Die," and Sexton signed it-- 'My derective is LIVE--to Ellie'."

When the article describes their friendship it mentions how competitive and similar they were. They both would drink martinis in Boston and reminisce about suicide attempts, and they saw themselves as "future suicides." Plath ended her life in 1963, inspiring Sexton's poem above, Sylvia's Death. Reading this poem and understanding that Sexton then committed suicide 11 years later, I can't believe I thought these were just boring poets at one point. The idea that they had to live with suicidal depression for the majority of their lives makes them heart-felt tragedies.

It just goes to show me that getting published and being so great as to be in a high-school English book does not make a life worth living. Nothng can do that for anyone. You have to do it yourself.