Rhyming Suicide Notes: “The writings of poets who wound up committing suicide contain words and language

patterns that serve as precursors to their eventual fate, researchers say.” Comparing the language patterns of more than a hundred poems of nine poets who ended their own lives — John Berryman, Hart Crane, Sergei Esenin, Adam L. Gordon, Randall Jarrell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sylvia Plath, Sarah Teasdale and Anne Sexton — with a similar number from nine demographically matched poets who had not suicided (including, interestingly, the psychiatrically troubled Robert Lowell) revealed that “the suicidal poets gravitated toward words indicating their detachment from other people and preoccupation with themselves,” according to the study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. Some of the parameters examined included the ratio of self-reference as compared to references to other people; trends in the frequency of word relating to interpersonal communication; and, of course, words related to death. Wired