Sara Teasdale and the 'Authorship' of Suicide

This talk by Dr JT Welsch will consider the notion that suicide is a death which has an ‘author’. Suicide is a category defined by intent, yet the ultimate unknowability of a person’s suicidal motives mirrors the problem of authorial intention in literary criticism. The emergence of suicidology as a scientific field in the mid-20th century also parallels the history of New Criticism and theories such as ‘the death of the author’, which questioned the importance of an author’s intentions. Thus, our responses to poetry and to suicide share what Daniel Münster and Ludek Broz (2016) describe as ‘a tension of agency’, where a person’s actions are viewed as both deliberate and determined by factors beyond their control. JT will explore the readerly problems raised when ‘the death of the author’ is not only a literal death but credited with author-like intentions, relating the work and life of the early-20th-century US poet Sara Teasdale to the loss of his twin sister, Sarah.

This talk draws from JT’s new book, The Poetry of Suicide: Lessons in Grief from the Lives and Deaths of Poets (Manchester University Press, April 2026), which combines memoir and scholarship to explore how reading poetry can transform our reading of suicide’s poetry-like ambiguities.