Emily Berry in TLS: ‘Of course, poets and suicide have history (“Poets are presumed to be ‘half in love with easeful death’, as John Keats put it”), but Welsch distances himself from the subject’s more sensationalist aspects. He identifies Al Alvarez’s The Savage God (1971) as the only other book to consider poetry and suicide together.’

And: ‘Those who wish to read or write about it are confronted, at least in English, with the limitations of language. In ancient Greek and Latin, Welsch notes, there were “more than 300 different expressions [to] describe different types of self-inflicted death”, and in German there are at least four nouns for suicide.’

Also: ‘“I opened my veins”, wrote Marina Tsvetaeva in 1934 (in Elaine Feinstein’s translation), seven years before ending her life: “Unstoppably/ life spurts out with no remedy.”’

Germans are good at poetry, and perhaps also at suicide.