Watchman, what of the night?
Doina Cosman, Bogdan C.S. ParvuFamily 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. pp. 13–26
Keywords: blood-taint, burnout, depression-based suicide