The Poet and Suicide

Poets die young, and the reason for the early death of the poet, I am afraid that the poet suicide ratio is high and not unrelated.

　　Since our first poet Qu Yuan was worried about the country and the people and threw himself into the Miluo River, many poets who were unmotivated or trapped by physical and mental factors have been effective from time to time. A famous one is Lu Zhaolin, one of the four great poets of the early Tang Dynasty, who could not bear the torture of wind paralysis and threw himself into the Ying River to die. In modern times, there is the scholar and poet Wang Guowei, who sank himself in the Summer Palace in Kunming Lake, a mystery that has been difficult to solve for hundreds of years.

　　In modern times, Zhu Xiang, an arrogant and cynical poet whom Lu Xun called "China's Keats", died at the age of 29 with a collection of Heine's poems in his hand, drinking wine and reciting poems, just like Qu Yuan, who threw himself into the river. Wang Yiren, a novelist and poet, died at the age of less than 25 after falling out of love and throwing himself into the sea.

　　During the "Ten-Year Cultural Revolution", several poets, unable to bear the humiliation, used their lives to arouse people's conscience to resist the tyranny, which is not desirable but still a brave act. For example, although he was a novelist, he wrote 300 poems in the old style, 3 new poems (long poems) and a large number of drums, which are not very influential poets. Chen Mengjia, who was influenced by Xu Zhimo and was regarded as one of the four poets of the New Moon poetry school along with Wen Yiduo, Xu Zhimo and Zhu Xiang, committed suicide by taking sleeping pills in protest against the atrocities and finally hanged himself nine days later. Wen Jie and Dai Houying were criticized for falling in love, so the lovers could not be married, and his heartbreaking pain and protest against the movement led him to commit suicide by gas.

　　Strangely enough, there seem to be more poets committing suicide since the new era. I wonder if it was because of his lost love that Haizi was unable to free himself. He committed suicide by lying on the rail near Shanhaiguan, and died with four books scattered around him: The Complete New and Old Testaments, Walden Lake, The Lonely Raft and the Selected Novels of Conrad. Gu Cheng, who became a New Zealand citizen, wrote four suicide letters on New Zealand's Rapids Island and wounded his wife, who died in time for resuscitation, and then hanged himself under a tree. Gomei, the "campus poet" who tied himself to a stone and sank in the Wanquan River in the western suburbs of Beijing, was only 24 years old when he died, the youngest poet to commit suicide in this article. Tadpole, a poetess, said she did not complain about her husband's infidelity, but she raised a sharp knife at home and cut the blood vessel in her thigh, and died in vain. Changyao, one of the representative figures of the New Border Poetry School, jumped to his death at the Qinghai Provincial People's Hospital after finding lung cancer in October 1999 and battling it for five months, unable to bear the torture of his deteriorating condition. Sanso, who was born at No. 145 Huangjiao Ya Jung Street in the Nanan District of Chongqing and lived there for three years, was also a poet and was admitted to the Taipei Veterans General Hospital due to her illness and committed suicide by hanging herself from her neck with a nylon stocking the day after her surgery was completed. Xu Chi, who caused a national sensation with his report "Goldbach's Conjecture," became a poet in his early years because he could not forget the young girl in red he met at an ice rink and began to write poems, but in his later years he jumped to his death from the Tongji Hospital in Wuhan because of a so-called second marital setback.

　　There are some other poets who committed suicide, but I won't name them all because very few of them are known.

　　Foreign poets are also very suicidal.

　　Sappho, the first female poet in ancient Greece, was the first to describe her personal love and loss of love, and she may have jumped off a cliff in grief because she was rejected by a gay man (but some studies suggest that she died of old age). There were more poets who committed suicide in the Soviet period. Yessenin and Mayakovsky, caught in a personal emotional and spiritual conflict, slit their wrists and hanged themselves, while the other drank a bullet and died. Two other Soviet poets, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva, who were well known in the West but suffered injustice at home, also died of external repression and extreme personal misfortunes in their families, the former not immediately from suicide, but from madness and exhaustion caused by suicide, etc., and the latter from hanging on a roof beam. Gorky, who entered the literary world first with his poetry and then with his novels, shot himself through the lobe of his lung in his early years (without dying). Pushkin and Lermontov did not want to live, so they died in a duel, but it was like a disguised suicide - "killing oneself with a knife". Goethe, who was caught in a web of love and could not extricate himself, once hid a sharpened dagger under his pillow. Byron was scolded by his mother when he was a child, so he stabbed himself in the chest with a knife, and when he grew up, he tried to kill himself several times because of his lame leg and fear of not being loved by a girl. Byron finally died of fever during the armed struggle to support the Greek volunteers for freedom, but he said, "It was to end this boring life that I came to Greece." Shelley's burial at sea seems to have nothing to do with suicide, but in fact he knew for sure that a storm was coming when he set sail, and he went there knowing that he might go to his death. British-Austrian writer and poet Zweig, one person relief is not enough, together with his wife committed suicide. The French essayist and poet Nerval, whose dreamy poems later merged into the symbolist and surrealist streams, may have hanged himself because he could not bear the torture of mental illness. Céline, who shook the post-war German poetry scene with his poem "Fugue of Death," died in a Nazi concentration camp after the death of his parents, and after his own hardships, he settled in Paris and died in the Seine. The controversial, yet passionate and creative American poetess Plath committed suicide in her London apartment, perhaps because of an emotional breakdown a few years after her marriage to the English poet Ted Hughes.

　　It is true that more poets commit suicide than many people in other professions. This is somewhat saddening. The poet's feelings are particularly rich and varied, and of course the poet is also very sensitive, with a strong sense of life and a strange imagination. And poetry is the flow of feelings, when the poet under the stimulation of certain factors, feelings are prone to surge, once it washed away the gate of reason and can not be controlled, some poets may be crazy up. Since ancient Greece, poetic genius has been considered to be related to "madness". Aristotle said in the Poetics, "Poetry requires a person with a unique poetic talent, or with the color of madness ......." In this case, the poet is prone to extreme behavior - suicide. Therefore, the poet must do his best to strengthen the gates of his sanity while allowing his feelings to ebb and flow.