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Depression has dimmed many creative lights
Victims are talented American poets of the 20th Century
By Carl Heintze
I have done it again. One year in every 10 I manage it--These are the opening lines of a poem by Sylvia Plath, one of the most famous and talented of American poets of the 20th century. Plath is writing not about any earthly success. She is writing about yet another suicide attempt.
Previously she had written, The Bell Jar, about an earlier attempt, also unsuccessful, to take her own life.
Eventually, on the third try, she succeeded. She turned on the gas oven in her home, put her head in it and, despite two children and a husband, ended her life.
It was an act which made her famous, perhaps even more famous than she might have been if she had lived. But she already had gained a reputation for her published work, even though she was barely 30.
Plath was one of a series of gifted poets who have suffered and died from the effects of bipolar depression, a clinical type of depression characterized by heights and depths of mood which succeed one another in terrifying sequence. Bipolar depression's highs are very high--manic, in fact, and unsustainable. Its lowest are an abyss, the darkest of pits in which to fall.
The heights bring forth in such writers as Robert Lowell and Virginia Wolf--and Plath--sudden and sometimes almost overwhelming periods of creativity. They are, unfortunately, followed by equally deep and scarring depths of depression when nothing emerges.
Wolf, for instance, would work at a maniacal pace on her novels, but when they were finished she usually fell into a deep depression which would take months to overcome.
No one who has not suffered clinical depression can understand how it is to sink into such a trough of despondency from which there seems no escape.
It is the fear of the arrival of such depression that eventually carries off the sufferer.
While Lowell's death--supposedly of a heart attack in a taxi cab--was not apparently a suicide, Plath's and Wolf's deaths clearly came about because they no longer could face the despair of renewed depression. Wolf, her pockets weighted with stones, walked into a river near her home and drowned.
Lowell's periods of depression usually were preceded by his sudden attachment to some young woman, not his long-suffering wife--an attachment which disappeared when his manic phase gave way to depression.
Plath's death was hastened by an impending divorce from her husband, the late Ted Hughes, also a poet. ( By a strange fate, Hughes second wife, ended her life in the same way six years after Plath died.)
Other writers have suffered from bipolar depression, who have written well at the height of the expansive phase of the illness, just as, oddly, there are writers and composers who have been influenced by syphilis--Frederich Nietzsche, for one, and perhaps Beethoven, for another.
Nietzsche, whose best known work is Thus Spake Zarathustra, died of the effects of syphilis. Although it is not certain, Beethoven's deafness may have been the result of syphilis.
And Isaac Dinesen, the Baroness von Blixon, who wrote Out of Africa, also suffered from syphilis most of her life, supposedly contracted from her husband.
Syphilis has psychiatric effects, but they are not always as devastating as those of depression.
For many years depression was an untreatable disease. That is no longer true.
Both Wolf and Plath lived before new drugs arrived in doctors' offices that can moderate and, perhaps, even eliminate bipolar depression.
The record is less clear about nonpolar depression, where there are no highs, only lows. But it is possible that had Plath lived now and not when she did in the 1950s, she might have been successfully treated and might still be with us.
It also is possible, of course, that had drugs been available to her she might not have written the poems that she did.
As it is, her output is small, but fierce and choice. Many critics considered her the first in the line of modern American feminist poets that includes Anne Sexton, yet another poet wracked by mental illness, women who fought to secure not only their poetry or writing, but also their place as wives and mothers.
Plath bore two children and wrote of them lovingly in some of her best poems.
If, indeed, she had a call to death, she also had a call to words. In the short time she lived she flung them like darts at the world and like darts most of them reached their target. They sound in the ear and in the mind.
More than that no poet can ask.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
