‘Suicides have a special language’, Anne Sexton wrote in her 1964 poem ‘Wanting to Die’. But is it a language we can learn to read?

In his book The Poetry of Suicide and in this talk, 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.

J. T. Welsch is a writer and academic born in the US and based in the UK, where he teaches
at the University of York. He is the author of several books of and about poetry, including Orchids, The Hell Creek Anthology and The Selling and Self- Regulation of Contemporary Poetry . He also edited the anthology of migrant poetry Wretched Strangers with Ágnes Lehóczky. His writing has appeared in Poetry Review, Boston Review and the Guardian.

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