Poets Die Young: A Selection from Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers (2019)

“Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of ‘emotional disorders’ than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, poets have far and away the highest suicide rates—as much as five times higher than the general population. Something about writing poetry appears either to attract the wounded or to open new wounds—and few have so perfectly embodied that image of the doomed genius as Sylvia Plath.

Plath was obsessed with suicide. She wrote about it, thought about it. ‘She talked about suicide in much the same tone as she talked about any other risky, testing activity: urgently, even fiercely, but altogether without self-pity,’ Alvarez wrote. . . .

Sylvia Plath . . . had a long history of emotional instability. She was treated with electroshock therapy for depression while still in college. She made her first suicide attempt in 1953. She spent six months in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital outside Boston. A few years later, she deliberately drove her car into a river—then, in typical fashion, wrote a poem about it:

‘And like the cat
I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.’”

—Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know (2019)