Here’s a lede that might send you to your room with the vapors: “As a rule the work of women poets is marked by intensity of feeling and fineness of perception rather than by outstanding technical accomplishment.” So writes Bernard Bergonzi in The Guardian in 1960 about Sylvia Plath’s first book, The Colossus.
Aiyiyi! Bergonzi’s CYA rejoinder is hardly better: “Miss Sylvia Plath is, however, a young American poetess whose work is most immediately noticeable for the virtuoso qualities of its style.” Oh, the days when we had dukes and duchesses, poets and poetesses!
But there’s more: “In The Colussus…, which is her first collection of poems, she writes with a degree of assurance that would be rare in her contemporaries of either sex on either side of the Atlantic.” What an anachronistic gem, no?
I know, I know. Don’t get in a whip, really. It’s thoroughly dated. But, boy, it’s priceless, too. And: In the end Bergonzi’s review is swimming with high praise for our American, um, poetess. And here’s his ending, something that might be credited with starting the Plath bandwagon in the first place:
“I read this collection with considerable pleasure, and I can happily recommend it to those inquiring spirits who demand at intervals if there are any new poets worth reading nowadays.”
So, now, why not ask, what of Sylvia Plath? Where is she? I mean, what of Sylvia Plath, who would have turned 80 this year, nowadays?
I’m not sure I can go there. You know, let’s be honest, what can be said about her that hasn’t already been written? She’s a marvel, for sure, the most thoroughly Renaissance sort of, delightful, muscular, physically textural poet of the generation of American poets born in the 1930s.
There’s an alternate universe where Plath is concerned, don’t you thing? In one, there is the poetry world with a virtual Plath living into old age and then who knows what that world would have looked like with Sylvia Her-Self one of the dominant living poets of our time.
In the other is a poetry world as it has existed without her, after 1963, our actual poetry world of the posthumous life of Sylvia Plath, with the hounded Ted Hughes and their children (and with one of her grown children hounded into adulthood too), our actual poetry world of fractured poetics after the death of Plath. It’s as if Plath’s death fragmentified (yes, that’s how we talk in Texas) American poetry for the last half century.
Here’s a late night question for you: Could Plath have kept the iamb alive? Would she have?
I’ll go this far: She’s a mark in time. She never took to the Modernist drink. She didn’t live long enough to relax her style into fin de siecle chumminess, though there is little indication that she would have. She never witnessed confessionalism ditch the mutilated psyche for the suburban anecdote. Her images, metaphors, lines, language, and music are whistle-slick, with what you might call the best poetic footwork of her era. Oh! She had sly boots. She was a whiz, as subversive as Emily Dickinson, as shrewd as Wallace Stevens. She never, and I mean never, reveals a moment in her poems where language undercuts meaning. Post-modernist extremity was not the extremity she was looking for (hat tip: Obi Wan). She was the last writer, after George Orwell, to make the rhetorical cool. Or put another way, if Whitman is our poet of the cosmos, Plath is our poet of the microcosmos. A poet of grammatical curvaceousness, she wrote in the key of the harmonics of the glistening.
And now it’s just hard to find her influence anywhere in today’s American poetry. Except in the searching for it.
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Poetry Wire Sound Check Revisited: Last week Poetry Wire invited you to listen to poems on Penn Sound and Poetry Foundation, and asked for suggestions of other good websites with audio or video recordings of poets. Our cup overfloweth. Gratitude to all. Please visit: San Francisco State University Poetry Center, University of Arizona Poetry Center, Lannan Foundation literary archive, Woodbury Poetry Room at Harvard University, and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
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4 responses
Ted Hughes, by the way, also referred to Plath as a “poetess” in some of his letters. He shared some of the prejudice against women poets, except for Emily Dickinson. On the on the other, he was unlike so many men of his time. He could cook and was right there with Plath when she gave birth. He even worked with her on relaxation exercises. Quite unusual for the time. I deal with all this in AMERICAN ISIS: THE LIFE AND ART OF SYLVIA PLATH.
Okay, you totally blew it in your Pound piece, but this is straight up word.
“she wrote in the key of the harmonics of the glistening” – every time I read that I feel carried off on the way of that key, by the two of you, together. Thank you.
But Plath conceived of herself in these same feminine, if, to us, not “feminist,” terms: “I shall be the poetess of America as Ted is the poet of England.” See James Fenton’s excellent essay on this aspect of Plath’s character and aesthetic in THE STRENGTH OF POETRY; or, if that collection isn’t on your shelves (and you don’t know how to search the NYRB archives, since his chapter on Plath first appeared in that publication), go into your kitchen and look for that copy of THE JOY OF COOKING your mother insisted buying for you, sure you would starve in your first apartment alone. It was the sole tome Plath carried with her on honeymoon, and she read it page by page, annotating the recipes as heavily as she did her editions of the poems of Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and D. H. Lawrence. Her intention was to swot her way through the collected work of Rombauer, and Plath checked off each recipe after she had cooked it to her satisfaction. And Ted’s, who complained to his brother that he’d gained ten pounds after a periods of Plath’s “fairy palace desserts.”
This scarcely marks an aberration or deviancy in Plath’s psyche; indeed, her *embrace* of the feminine, whether frighteningly Medean, as in “Lady Lazarus”–which, apropos your column this week, David, might be considered a great political poem–or achingly tender, as in her poems for her children, Plath reclaimed for women poets the right to embrace their femininity, their Otherness, and still be taken seriously as poets. Until Plath, we had to model ourselves on men.
In the same post-Romantic, “confessional” era, as Lowell and Jarrell (and after them James Wright) gave men permission to be quiveringly vulnerable, Plath did the same for women with anger, and not just at the Abandoning Husband, as most still seem to think. She was “rather a political person,” as she said in the British Council interview with Peter Orr; and she wrote about the effects of thalidomide as well as the Shoah, for which she has been excoriated, but as she explains to Orr, this is consonant with her German and Austrian heritage.
For those with a strong interest in Plath, or those who simply want to investigate her various and fascinating complexities, check out *Plath Profiles*, an international journal that appears annually:http://www.iun.edu/~nwadmin/plath.In the interests of full disclosure, I have a long omnibus essay with Heather Clark’s *Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: The Grief of Influence* at its center; and in a special fall supplement, I’ll be publishing the first installment of my “poet’s memoir,” a long-term project suggested to me by William Buckley, one of the two editors, the other being Peter K. Steinberg, whose “A Celebration, This Is” (http://www.sylviaplath.info), I call, I think rightly, the “gold standard” of such sites in an April 5, 2012 post in one of my own brief posts on Goodreads, which, as you know, David, has the NBCC imprimatur(http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/9585.Diann_Blakely). In this and other entries, you’ll find links to the reading I did for these pieces, as well as the one I was asked to the Bloomington Conference held in honor of the 50th anniversary of the American *Ariel*’s publication, “Bee-Stung in October.” This paper isn’t about Rita Dove’s *Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry* and Plath’s shocking omission from that volume *per se*, but instead about some of the wacko conspiracy theories that sprung up in its wake. The paper will be available in full form–I was asked to cut it to just two of these theories, meaning Dove deleted Plath because she believed her antecedent racist, and the more widespread belief that Plath was crazy–to meet the panel’s required length on *Plath Profiles* some time next spring or early summer.
What a lovely surprise to come upon this column! I’d just read your piece on political poetry this morning and tried to add some titles via Twitter feed, but I’m not very techno-proficient and thus check to see if they came through. Thank you, David.
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