Watchman, what of the night?
Watchman, what of the night?

Summary/Abstract: Family studies focusing on four poets who committed suicide and two other poets who suffered from manic-depressive illness converge upon earlier findings which indicate that there is a familial, genetically-based pattern to suicide in this somehow exclusivist world of poetry-making. The other predictors of autolytic death (aloofness, loser status, hopelessness, helplessness, etc) function in a rather more discreet manner most probably because of the autonomous, introverted and self-contained nature of the poet who, endowed with considerable ego-strength as he is, fights off whatever outside censorship, but crushes down under the strain within. Already vulnerable, because of his blood-tainted nature, he will just burn out while plunging into the abyss that the creative process challenges him with, time and again.

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