http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010725/od/poets_dc_1.html
Wednesday July 25 8:17 AM ET
Clues to Future Suicide Contained in Poets' Words
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The writings of poets of various nationalities
who committed suicide contain words and language patterns that give
clues about their eventual fate, researchers said on Tuesday.
Using a computer program that examines word usage in written texts, the
researchers analyzed 156 poems written by nine poets who committed
suicide and 135 poems written by nine poets who did not. They found that
the suicidal poets gravitated toward words indicating their detachment
from other people and preoccupation with themselves.
``The key finding is that we were able to distinguish features of
people's mental health by the language they use,'' said James
Pennebaker, a University of Texas psychology professor who conducted the
research along with University of Pennsylvania graduate student Shannon
Wiltsey Stirman.
``The words we use, especially what often appear to be the unimportant
words, say a lot about who we are, what we're thinking and how we're
approaching the world,'' he added.
The study appears in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
The researchers looked at the works of John Berryman (1914-1972), Hart
Crane (1899-1932), Sergei Esenin (1895-1925), Adam L. Gordon
(1833-1870), Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), Vladimir Mayakovsky
(1893-1930), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Sarah Teasdale (1884-1933) and
Anne Sexton (1928-1974), all of whom took their own lives.
It compared their works to poets matched as closely as possible by
nationality, era, education and gender. All the poets were American,
British or Russian.
The comparison group included Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Lawrence
Ferlinghetti (1919-present), Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), Denise Levertov
(1923-1997), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938),
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), Adrienne Rich (1929-present) and Edna St.
Vincent Millay (1892-1950).
The poets who committed suicide used many more first-person singular
self-references such as ``I,'' ``me'' and ``my'' and fewer first-person
plural words than did the non-suicidal poets.
``Issues of identity, isolation and connection to others is revealed in
pronoun usage,'' Pennebaker said in an interview. ''One of the most
telling words of all is the word 'I.' People who are suicidal or
depressed use 'I' at much, much higher rates, and there's also a
corresponding drop in references to other people.''
The suicidal poets also generally reduced their use of communication
words such as ``talk,'' ``share'' and ``listen'' over time heading
toward their self-inflicted deaths, while the non-suicidal poets tended
to increase their use of such words.
The suicidal ones also used more words associated with death, but
surprisingly the amount of words with negative emotion (for example,
``hate'') or positive emotion (''love'') did not vary significantly
between the groups.
Pennebaker said previous research has found that suicide rates are much
higher among poets than among other literary writers and the general
public, and that poets are more prone to depression and bipolar
disorder, also called manic-depressive illness.
``As a group, no one would call poets a particularly bubbly, chipper
group,'' Pennebaker added.
He said the patterns of language used by the poets who eventually took
their lives could serve as ``linguistic predictors of suicide'' in
current poets. ``This is not some kind of causal relationship. We're not
saying that if you use 'I' a lot, then you'll commit suicide. It's just
simply a marker of greater risk,'' Pennebaker said.
--
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