Sylvia Plath

[Dark Muse]

I myself am a huge fan of the work of Plath and I heard someone make mention as to why she is not discussed more often around her, and from my experiences with comments I have heard others make in the past, there seems to be a certain stigma towards Plath, and an attitude held that the reason why Plath is so popular is primarily because of the nature of her death which has created around her a cult like following. There is a belief that it is the sort of fascination about her suicide which causes people to read her work.

There seems to be this general feeling among some that Plath as a whole was a mediocre writer, and if she had not been so infamous, people would not think so much of her work.

The couple of times I had tried to bring up Plath I was surprised by the overwhelming negative responses which I received from others. I was quite surprised and happy to see how much more positive response this thread has attracted.

[quasimodo1]

SLEEP IN THE MOJOVE DESERT


Out here there are no hearthstones,
Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.
And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly
On the mind’s eye, erecting a line
Of poplars in the middle distance, the only
Object beside the mad, straight road
One can remember men and houses by.
A cool wind should inhabit those leaves
And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,
In the blue hour before sunup.
Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,
Or those glittery fictions of spilt water
That glide ahead of the very thirsty.


I think of the lizards airing their tongues
In the crevice of an extremely small shadow
And the toad guarding his heart’s droplet.
The desert is white as a blind man’s eye,
Comfortless as salt. ...{excerpt}

[dyne7]

plath is a great writer. i don't see how someone could argue against that. her imagery is immaculate, intense, almost demonic in some senses, but as she neared the end of her life, the fervor with which she wrote increased. she knew her time was coming. you have to bear that in mind when you read works like Ariel. The Bell Jar is a book of immense quality. she had one of the most fully realized voices in history, and i think that is her legacy. however, my personal opinion is that in some ways, she ruined modern poetry by creating cults of writers obsessed with the confessional poetry genre. confessional poetry not done 'right' is absolutely horrid. these teenage angst poems with cliche's and dark themes stem from an absolute elementary level of what she went out to accomplish. it's kind of like the people that say that michael jordan destroyed basketball by his image which pressured young players into abandoning fundamentals, great as he was.

[Buh4Bee]

Well, stated. Thank you for articulating her literary validity so well. I agree that she wrote with a unique tormented voice. This quality defines her and humanity's fascination with troubled people. I thought the Bell Jar was beautifully written and deeply observant of the human conditions as well as our need for caring human relationships. I am not a well versed person to her poetry, but what I have read is worthy of acknowledgment.

[JBI]

plath is a great writer. i don't see how someone could argue against that. her imagery is immaculate, intense, almost demonic in some senses, but as she neared the end of her life, the fervor with which she wrote increased. she knew her time was coming. you have to bear that in mind when you read works like Ariel. The Bell Jar is a book of immense quality. she had one of the most fully realized voices in history, and i think that is her legacy. however, my personal opinion is that in some ways, she ruined modern poetry by creating cults of writers obsessed with the confessional poetry genre. confessional poetry not done 'right' is absolutely horrid. these teenage angst poems with cliche's and dark themes stem from an absolute elementary level of what she went out to accomplish. it's kind of like the people that say that michael jordan destroyed basketball by his image which pressured young players into abandoning fundamentals, great as he was.

I'll go against as, as her literary hysterics are merely gimmicky pretensions - explain how her upper-middle class educated upbringing warrants a comparison with a Jew in Auschwitz and I'll listen, but we read her for the perceived nearly pornographic violence of images in her poem, which are merely constructed out of our obsession with the way she died. Something like daddy shows a bratty girl. As for creating a cult of "confessional poets," that would be Lowell and Roethke, the latter of which I particularly admire, who Plath followed too - in truth, Ariel wasn't even published in her lifetime.

I guess in terms of influence, I will quote Woody Allen in Annie Hall, when his character Andie says, "Oh Sylvia Plath, whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the schoolgirl mentality." Truth be told, the Bell Jar is a meh book, and her poems are simply an annoying girl ranting against a world that offered her opportunity and privilege. The bit about being depressed over her husband is a biographical misinterpretation, to quote woody again "misinterpreting as romantic" a rather egocentric, conceited suicidal hack.

[Alexander III]

I guess in terms of influence, I will quote Woody Allen in Annie Hall, when his character Andie says, "Oh Sylvia Plath, whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the schoolgirl mentality." Truth be told, the Bell Jar is a meh book, and her poems are simply an annoying girl ranting against a world that offered her opportunity and privilege. The bit about being depressed over her husband is a biographical misinterpretation, to quote woody again "misinterpreting as romantic" a rather egocentric, conceited suicidal hack.

By that logic should we discredit Childe Harold and The Sorrows of Young Werther, they were both two individuals which needn't have worked a day in their entire lives and yet both were irrevocably depressed with their condition. Suffering can be both physical and mental, a person from the upper-classes can suffer just as much as one from the lower classes even though the former has far less problems in terms of practical reality.

Or is your complaint rather than in regards to the subject of her book rather the style which you find lackluster ?

I have not read the bell jar so I could not comment in that regard.

[JCamilo]

Well, exagerated, but Plath is just ok. Bell Jar is not a great book by any length. Interesting, she is good with words, some poems are fine. But that is all. As much her myth helps to increase the power of her poems (much as Byron, Poe, Keats, etc) she did not enough to be as great, just a good poetress.

[dyne7]

i must respectfully disagree with some of our users here. her IMAGERY is solid stuff. pain is both mental and physical, and i myself write of experiences i've never undergone. everyone has their limit. two people in a gym. one can bench 150 pounds. the other, 250. both are lifting their absolute max, but which is stronger? they're both experiencing as much as they can handle. that's why i cant stand it when people say 'well don't whine because this person, or these people have it so much worse.' the mind can be a prison. the voice of plath is one of the most defined of any writer anywhere. no one can deny that her suicide brought her to the forefront of authors that were read. but her STUFF is incredible. NO QUESTION one of the better female poets of the last 50 years. so many poets have stated her influence on their writing. and about her husband, there is no misinterpretation how she felt over him. married, but...very, very strained relationship. i think he was jealous of her actually. a great poet himself, no doubt. but he couldn't do it like she did. you have to really read some of her old journals and writings. and The Bell Jar was a near biographical account of what really happened to her. of course it isn't one of the most 'well-written' books, whatever that means. it's the power in them. she saw connections in objects that were mind-boggling. in that regard, she was the modern day Dickinson (although, not quite the prodigy admittedly) which reminds me. 2013, the Plath estate is releasing unpublished journals and papers from plath that ted hughes kept under wraps. it'll be 40 years after her death.

as a final note, listen to intensity of her later works. it's madness. but it's not weepy, silly girl madness. she makes the sickest connections, and she's not even trying. internally, she harbored everything she wrote about. i have to admit, i grew up disliking her poetry very much until the last few years, when i purchased her books. and i saw the process. i saw how everything warped. when you fill in all of the autobiographical pieces about her along the way, and knowing when each poem was published, it's startling stuff. Ted Hughes, for the most part has received more praise from literary circles than Plath did, but everyone knows who the better writer was. it's hard to explain why. you just have to go through the process. i'm sure theres academic papers written somewhere detailing all of that. seek them out.

sorry for the ramble. hopefully it was cohesive.

[JBI]

But one begs the question, why do I care about her pain? Why is her hysteria somehow relevant to me, and why does the I in poetry need to even reflect the poet, much less why do we care about it.

As for this everybody knows, who is everybody? in terms of academics, I think the verdict now is that Hughes as an ok poet, and plath a meh poet - the actual acceptance of this confessional poetry as something beyond a few good poets is relatively constrained to certain academic circles of the US (which birthed the movement) with, as I said, Roethke and Lowell and the excellent Bishop who is sometimes thrown in there.

[OrphanPip]

I think JBI is a bit overly harsh on Plath, but he's also mostly right that she isn't really all that great. I think Plath is an alright poet, she knew how to write a poem at least, she wasn't simply a no-talent hack. Is there anything particularly great or interesting about Plath's poetry? I'm not really sure there is much there.

One thing Plath has is that a few of her better poems are highly accessible, and thus are often effective introductions to poetry for young readers. Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Ariel are fine poems, most of her other stuff doesn't impress me too much. I have to agree with JBI about the holocaust imagery being a bit too much. I'd agree that Roethke is far more interesting as well, one of my favourites.

[dyne7]

i can definitely see how one may not care about her mental turmoil. but then again, i must ask your opinion of the poet alan ginsberg. is he of the same mold, in your opinion? of course, we must consider that as plath won a pulitzer (after her death, true) and hughes was a former poet laureate, just calling one 'ok' and the other 'meh' may be a bit of a stretch. i guess it just depends on what you look for in poetry. i look for strong images, and something resembling a narrative. plath has this in droves. hughes, academically i would say he is a stronger writer in regards to form and process, but not necessarily to the EXPERIENCE which is what i value most in a poem. it's why im rather fond of sharon olds as a writer. but, one of the strongest hughes poems i ever read, was this one, 'last letter', found after his death, written for sylvia, and was left out of his award winning book 'birthday letters.'

Last Letter

What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?

Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to Rugby St
Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.

That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.

Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of Euston Road
And returned to where my telephone waited.

What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’


Now, for a plath poem.

Fever 103

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ----

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ----
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ----
To Paradise.




i love the imagery there. such strong word choices, it reads rather well too. listening to her interviews, she had a gorgeous speaking voice. it just brims with intensity. your thoughts on the different styles of the two?

[JCamilo]

I think JBI is a bit overly harsh on Plath, but he's also mostly right that she isn't really all that great. I think Plath is an alright poet, she knew how to write a poem at least, she wasn't simply a no-talent hack. Is there anything particularly great or interesting about Plath's poetry? I'm not really sure there is much there.

One thing Plath has is that a few of her better poems are highly accessible, and thus are often effective introductions to poetry for young readers. Lady Lazarus, Daddy, and Ariel are fine poems, most of her other stuff doesn't impress me too much. I have to agree with JBI about the holocaust imagery being a bit too much. I'd agree that Roethke is far more interesting as well, one of my favourites.

JBI dislike cults. Haven't you noticed, his dreadful nightmare is the day Tolkien followers discovers Plath was an elf

Of course, some people may care about what she feels, so it is not relevant if JBI cares or not. But Plath a modern Dickinson? I cannot imagine how. Plath is guilty of trying to much, overboarding. She does have strong imagens, like Dyne suggests, yes she does. But a Pulitzer is almost an offense. It says she is ok and people read her. And to be a Poet laureate does not say much. Wordsworth was a poet laureate when he stopped writting. And since Tennyson, nobody was really such dominating voice of his genration. It shows Hughes was ok. But really, the emotional charge of Plath poem do not always find a proper form, it is something insecure. She obviously was not bad but needed a lot yet to come near the emotional power of Elizabeth Browning, for example.
But Bell Jar is not bad written, it is conventional. It is ok. Gave me the impression of a hollywood film with Angelina Jolie. A girl's diary polished for publishing. The writting does not excell (neither is really lacking). Her poems are better.

[LadyGodiva]

Ive met her poetry by means of a friend and i was quite affected by this very first poem of her ive read, Mirror. sometimes just spouting it aloud, all in me gets revealed.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

[Fafnir]

I'm relatively new to poetry and I'm not too confident in my reading abilities but Plath strikes me as a good poet for 'beginners'.
The poem I liked best was Tulips:

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year~old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

It explores what I imagine to be quite a taboo subject, especially for a mother: an almost selfish desire for escape, to the extent that she disdains her own family. Their smiles in her photograph are 'little smiling hooks' trying to draw her back to herself, an annoyance rather than a comfort. An unpleasant reminder of her identity and responsibility.
I do get the impression that her mental state is at least partly influenced by her medical treatments with the lines: 'They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.' and 'They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep', they explain the dreamlike, ethereal quality of the poem.
I like the imagery of the tulips. They seem almost threatening and frightening, their presence is 'loud' somehow. A crimson gouge in the otherwise pristine white oblivion of her mind.

However, I can understand some people's dislike for confessional poetry.
For instance, in Daddy she just seems to be wallowing in misery. I disliked the holocaust imagery, it came across as deliberately provocative and a bit immature. The poem would have been better without it.

[OrphanPip]

My favourite Plath poem is probably "Cut," because I think it has a bit of a morbid playfulness to it.

Cut

What a thrill --
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man --

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump --
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.