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Finding Sylvia: a Journey to Uncover the Woman Within Plath's Confessional Poetry

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Finding Sylvia: a Journey to Uncover the Woman Within Plath's Confessional Poetry University of Mary Washington Eagle Scholar Student Research Submissions Fall 2017 Finding Sylvia: A Journey to Uncover the Woman within Plath's Confessional Poetry Emily Daly Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Daly, Emily, "Finding Sylvia: A Journey to Uncover the Woman within Plath's Confessional Poetry" (2017). Student Research Submissions. 236. https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/236 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by Eagle Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student Research Submissions by an authorized administrator of Eagle Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Mary Washington Finding Sylvia: A Journey to Uncover the Woman within Plath’s Confessional Poetry Emily Daly ENGL 491: Independent Study Dr. Mara Scanlon April 24, 2018 Daly 2 The life and work of Sylvia Plath has been of great interest since her suicide in 1963. While her poems and short stories had been published in a variety of journals and magazines before her death, it was not until the posthumous release of Ariel that Plath’s true depths were discovered by a large audience and she gained popular acclaim. Critics now claim that The Colossus and Other Poems was Plath’s discovery of her own voice and her taking on of “the world of what is important to her” (Kendall 9), but that it is Ariel that un-repentantly reveals Plath’s true emotions (Butscher 341). The “Sylvia1” identity that arose from the ashes of Plath’s suicide was someone new to critics and friends alike - as Bere says, there are “obvious discrepancies between the [public] Sivvy of the letters ‘singing’ her ‘native joy of life’ and the violent, destructive poet of Ariel” (Wagner-Martin 61); however, there is something undeniably real about the “Sylvia” that appears in Ariel. The Ariel Sylvia was not the put-together Sylvia that would have tea in one’s living room nor the doting daughter who would write letters home from England nor Hughes’s Sylvia who “had a great capacity for happiness” (Becker 48). Instead, Ariel’s “Cut,” “Edge,” and “Daddy” focus on death, hatred, and pain - not topics someone “remorselessly bright and energetic” (Butscher 341) would fixate on. While some artists have placed their identity farther from their work, Plath is known for her confessional style poetry – a form of poetry which, according to Steven Gould Axelrod, consists of three essential elements: “an undisguised exposure of painful personal event . a dialectic of private matter with public matter . and an intimate, unornamented style” (Axelrod 98). Unlike other styles of poetry that are set apart by form or specific themes, confessional poetry is defined by the author’s “expression of personal pain” such as “destructive family relationships; traumatic childhoods; broken marriages; recurring mental breakdowns; alcoholism 1 “Sylvia” refers specifically to Plath’s identity, whether that be a false or true identity. It does not speak to Plath’s work or legacy, but rather, who she was as a person. Daly 3 or drug abuse” (Collins 197). Born out of feelings of lost individuality that arose in the 1950s and 60s, confessional poetry aimed to “embody the individual perception in direct ways,” setting itself apart from previous forms because “rather than creating masks or different personae, they [confessional poets] began to speak from a position which was unambiguously their own” (Collins 199). For these reasons, writing confessional poetry requires an understanding of one’s own suffering, along with an ability and willingness to capture that personal pain in an honest and vulnerable form of poetry – after all, it has been coined “confessional poetry” because it requires that the author “confess” painful truths regarding him or herself. A single glance at poems such as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” shows that Plath was a textbook example of the confessional poet – her writing (especially at the end of her life) focused on her own painful struggles with loss, a dying marriage, mental illness, and other challenging areas of her life. One such autobiographical poems is “Words heard, by accident, over the phone,” a poem that discusses Plath’s actual experience of answering the phone and having her husband’s lover ask to speak to him. The poem describes the speaker receiving a call from an unnamed individual who asks, “Is he here?” It is a seemingly harmless question, but the poems describes the words as “plopping like mud,” implying – in a heavy-handed fashion – that there is something about these words in this context that is dirty and sullies the speaker’s home. The speaker then asks, “how shall I ever clean the phone table?” (Plath, Collected Poems, 202), bringing to light the speaker’s desire to clean her household of the incident, which she considers to be filthy and unhealthy. It also demonstrates a hopelessness that this stain could ever be removed from them, as the speaker finds no answer for how to clean the phone table. As is typical of confessional poems, there is very little masking of the real-life event in this poem, and the speaker is not invented, but rather is interchangeable with Plath herself. Just like the speaker Daly 4 in the poem, Plath historically answered the phone in 1962 only to have Assia, Hughes’ lover, ask her “Is he here?” about Plath’s husband. As demonstrated by “Words heard, by accident, over the phone” above, Plath adopted a very personal style of poetry, tying her poems to her identity in a way that many authors would not dare, and bringing her identity into the spotlight with the success of Ariel. Like “Words heard, by accident, over the phone,” countless other poems by Sylvia Plath including “Suicide off Egg Rock,” “Edge,” and “Cut” are inspired by her experiences. For this reason, it can become easy to view her poems as biography or fact, when they are actually creative works. While it is true that Plath’s poems are often emotionally relevant to her, the emotions that she conveys were never meant to be expressed as singularly her own. Rather, she intended to write poetry that would echo both her own emotions and the emotions of her audience. The sheer number of drafts that Plath produced is evidence that she was not simply describing her experiences during sudden bursts of emotional turmoil, but rather striving to create poems that spoke to something that she wanted to be understood through careful choice of words and tone. On one account, she created seven boxes worth of drafts from 67 poems, all of which were full of markups and changes (Brain 22). The Collected Poems, winner of a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, is further evidence of how Plath’s poems, though emotional, are intensely controlled. E. Lucas Myers describes the text, saying, “There is not an imperfectly finished poem in Sylvia Plath’s book” (31). While many writers perfect the form and tone of poems that they plan to publish, Plath perfected every poem that she wrote, leaving no poem unfinished or unedited, even when she did not intend its publication. It is apparent from the amount of effort Plath put into her work that her poems were not diary entries, but rather a meticulous art form that she designed to carry her voice and Daly 5 experiences. She best explains herself when she says, “[M]y poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but…I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying…with an informed and an intelligent mind” (Plath, Orr interview). For these reasons, researcher and Plath expert Karen Kukil believes that Plath intelligently designed her poems so that they could become universal (Kukil)– being born from Plath’s personal experiences and molded into an expression of human emotion that she believed all people share. Through thorough editing and painstaking re-writing, Plath strived to pour her emotions into poems that would reverberate with her readers’ deepest selves. As Collins says, “the individual in Plath’s work is often an explicit part of history” (Collins 205), not speaking only for Plath herself, but being a voice for the era as well. While Plath’s poems are certainly related to her experiences and can be insightful when regarding her life, they are intelligently edited in order to step away from raw emotion and create something both meaningful and mindful. For this reason, it would be a disservice to Plath to directly use the content of her poems as autobiographical, as it would ignore her thoughtful editing process and hours of meticulous editing. Rather, Plath’s poems demonstrate her use of her experiences in the same way that a sculptor uses a slab of marble - using her experiences for raw material and intelligently carving her voice from the slab of her emotions. Plath’s meticulous editing of her poems in no way discredits her as a confessional poet, in fact, Collins comments that although confessional poets used their own experiences as a basis for their work, “it is neither true nor useful to imagine that their lives appeared in their poetry unmediated by the creative power to shape and transform” (Collins 199). Though capturing an emotional experience, most confessional poems are in no way written solely in the heat of the moment with nothing but feeling driving them. Although Plath and other confessional poets may Daly 6 give off the impression of having a very casual style, behind that façade is the reality of a “finely tuned appreciation of form and an ability to manipulate line and stanza to give the effect of unedited emotion” (Collins 199).
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