159
Is there a shaman in Sylvia? Sylvia’s redemptive Imagination
Ananya Ghoshal “Cold glass how you insert yourself Between myself and myself I scratch like a cat
The blood that runs is a dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic.
You smile No, it is not fatal.” (Sylvia Plath, “The Other”)
1 Sylvia Plath, diagnosed with an acute manic depressive behavior and bipolar disorder, is often reduced to and recognized as a morbid and suicidal poet rather than a mystic. It is impossible to deny that the feminist and suicidal trajectories of Plath's mental picture take us deeply into her poetry but also often prove too reductive a preoccupation with Plath as a
1 Personal typed pages of poet & author Sylvia Plath's work coupled with imagery of the artist Rebecca Star Butler. See- http://www.flickr.com/photos/rococo/224585635/
Plath Profiles 160 victim. There exists something hidden at the substructure of her writing which is inadequately described even by the poems themselves. She confronted death and "otherness," but what were the ultimate terms of the confrontation?
To achieve a philosophical context of her vision, I have turned to Ted Hughes who once remarked that Sylvia possessed the qualities of a shaman,
“In her poetry . . . she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men.”
The Jungian notion of the shaman is of “a primitive medicine man who gains access to the underworld of the psyche and the realm of his tribe's mythos through an initiation which usually involves a ritual dismemberment and rebirth.” The shaman does not undergo an actual dismemberment but it is rather a psychotic episode. 2 This paper attempts an analysis of Plath’s poetry from this perception of a transformative ritual – like a shaman's dismemberment and resurrection through the ritual death of the psyche and its eventual recovery. 3
The word shaman, according to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál is the Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know” as in the French word savoir and the Spanish saber to designate a Wise One or One Who Sees .) The word has passed from Sanskrit ( śramana – ascetic) through Pali ( śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (s ămán), Turkik-Tungusic (shaman), Russian and German into English. The origins of shamanism may well go back 4,500 years or more and involves a path or paths to knowledge, gained through rituals, ceremonies, prayers, meditation, trials and tests. The shaman is a visionary, prophet, healer,
2 Robert S. Robbins’s essay on Sylvia Plath was the first inspiration for me to deal at length with the concept of the shaman –poet in Sylvia. See- http://www.geocities.com/rrobbins.geo/plath.htm 3 Judith Kroll's book Chapters In A Mythology: The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath discusses in detail the way Plath developed her own kind of mythology to explain her bouts of depression and euphoria. Kroll, argues that Sylvia viewed her nervous breakdown as a shaman's dismemberment and rebirth through ritual death of the psyche and recovery, "The dispersed 'stones' of the speaker's shattered self are gathered together and reconstructed, reenacting the myths of Dionysus (who is alluded to in 'Maenad'), Osiris, and other gods who undergo dismemberment and resurrection." Kroll points out how Sylvia Plath made frequent enquiries regarding the archetypal shamanic/author figure of Orpheus in her poems to uncover the psychic depth of the human unconscious and its constant making/remaking.
161 ceremonialist and a psychotherapist. “The Shaman ”, writes the religious historian Mercia Eliade, is “a medicine man, priest, and psycho pomp. He cures illness. He directs the communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world” and is “above all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself,” through a process of initiation, “the schema [of which] is suffering, death and resurrection.”4 A religious expert in the art of psychic healing, both for individual primitives and for society, a shaman undergoes ecstatic psychic ascents to heaven and descents to hell, with all manner of related physiological pain, to acquire an elixir or healing power for patients. Whether literal or metaphorical, shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and out-of-body experiences. Eliade emphasizes several times in Shamanism that what is really central to the shamanic experience is undergoing of concrete psychological processes of death, dismemberment and resurrection: a process similar to that of an initiation rite, except that the shaman experiences it repeatedly, whenever the psychic health of the individual or the society demands. (Scigaj, 90) Undergoing this initiation into the multi-layered world of spirits, a shaman learns the methods of trance and soul retrieval, and becomes, in Eliade's recurring phrase, a "technician of the sacred,” a “Master of Ecstacy”; of ex-stasis (from the Greek, meaning outside the normal stasis of consciousness). From a state of waking sleep he wakes up to true reality, the reality of the nagual 5 or the reality of imagination. In civilized societies the shaman is primarily the guardian of existing collective ritual and tradition; a repository of the knowledge its culture's history, both sacred and secular. Joan Halifax, in Shamanic Voices , writes:
It is the shaman who weaves together the ordinary world that is lived in and the philosophical image of the cosmos that is thought of. Human existence, suffering, and death are rendered by shamans into a system of philosophical, psychological, spiritual, and sociological symbols that institutes a moral order by resolving ontological paradoxes and dissolving existential barriers, thus eliminating the most painful and unpleasant aspects of human life. The perfection of the timeless past, the paradise of a mythological era, is an
4 In A Match to the Heart" by Gretel Ehrlich writes-“Death is a dark thing, but it is also an illumination....Ritual death followed by resurrection stands for the death of ego. It is the hero's journey and the teacher's...as well as any shaman's or healer's.” 5 The word “nagual” belongs to the Nahuatl language spoken by the people of Tehotihuacan, the Toltecs, Aztecs and many other indigenous groups of the past and present in Mexico and even some regions of Central America. Nagual is half of the reality in which we live and half of our own nature.
Plath Profiles 162
existential potential in the present. And the shaman, through sacred action, communicates this potential to all.
Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th century and contemporary western art. Naturally, there is often a hint of pseudoscience and mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism is mentioned, and some of the popular literature like the works of Carlos Castaneda embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture. Today, in a broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with metaphysical or psychic processes.
True poetry, for Ted Hughes, was always a shamanic activity, and the shamanic flight to the spirit world for the healing energies needed in our own world was, for him, "the fundamental poetic event." 6 In folktales and myths, he had found the basic experience of the poetic temperament to be of the heroic quest which had shown its superior examples in Eliot, Yeats and Graves, but he had to refashion them to serve his own purpose. And not until he had studied archeology and anthropology was Hughes able to identify its variations in shamanism all over the world. For him, the shaman is the man who has a vision, undergoes a magical death, is dismembered by a demon and is resurrected with new ideas and a new body created for him by the spirits. In his flight and return he displays healing powers and provides clairvoyant information bringing up to our ordinary mind the revelations of our deepest instinct and spiritual insights. Like the shaman, for Hughes, the poet undergoes with phenomenal intensity the flight and return that will produce the practical result of the regeneration of spirit.
Hughes initially got his concept of shamanism from reading Mircea Eliade's book Shamanism , which he reviewed in 1964, as well as from the Tibetan Book of the Dead , Bardol Thodol, which is a record of such a psychic journey. Hughes writes in his review: “the shamanic flight is one of the main regeneration dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental poetic event,"7 and it is the regenerative power of the shaman/poet's flight which was of
6 Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe , pp. 206-7 7 In the 29th issue of The Listener (1964), Hughes reviews Mircea Eliade's Shamanism , now reprinted in Winter Pollen (Hughes 1994, 58).
163 utmost importance to him, being the means by which he has consistently sought to counter the divisions and the sterility which he sees in our world and to restore it to wholeness. “The results, when the shaman returns to the living, are some display of healing power, or a clairvoyant piece of information. The cathartic effect on the audience, and the refreshing of their religious feeling, must be profound” (Scigaj, 91). Hughes had repeatedly stated that many of his poems are deliberate shamanic flights of fancy into the spirit world, excursions to the “other side” where he might properly inhabit the nature of his subject, be it animal, vegetable or mineral and the role he plays as poet must be understood literally in terms of the activity of the shaman.
Further, he uses the same term to describe Plath's poetic activity:
Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way that clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans and holy men, and more recently flung open to tourists with the passport of such hallucinogens as LSD. 8
In an essay entitled 'Sylvia Plath and Her Journals' 9, originally published as an introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath , Ted Hughes argues that all of Plath's writing was, in a strict sense mythical as well as autobiographical.
The root system of her talent was a deep and inclusive inner crisis which seems to have been quite distinctly formulated in its chief symbols (presumably going back at least as far as the death of her father, when she was eight) by the time of her first attempted suicide, in 1953, when she was twenty-one. After 1953, it became a much more serious business, a continuous, hermetically sealed process that changed only very slowly, so that for years it looked like deadlock. Though its preoccupation dominated her life, it remained largely outside her ordinary consciousness, but in her poems we
8 Ted Hughes, " Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems , Tri Quarterly, 7 (Fall 1966), 82. When this essay was reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath , the sentence about shamans and LSD was omitted. 9 Ted Hughes, 'Sylvia Plath and her Journals', in Paul Alexander (ed.), Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
Plath Profiles 164
see the inner working of it. It seems to have been scarcely disturbed at all by the outer upheavals she passed through, by her energetic involvement in her studies, in her love affairs and her marriage, though she used details from them as a matter of course for images to develop her X rays. (Hughes, 185)
For Hughes, Plath's life and writing formed a single, archetypal drama of psychic rebirth, rooted in 'a deep and inclusive inner crisis' and Plath's initial task, like that of any shaman was to heal this crisis, a " bee-line instinct." As Hughes saw it, her poetry, up until the birth of Ariel , records a "strange limbo of 'gestation / regeneration' which followed her 'death' i.e. her first suicide attempt. Ted writes that Sylvia's poetry up until the birth of "the poetic spirit Ariel" was something akin to shamanic initiation. It was "the biology of Ariel, the ontology of Ariel" 10 "a process of self-salvation" and "a resurrection of Sylvia's deepest spiritual vitality" which Sylvia interpreted as her own "drama" of death, gestation and rebirth. Elsewhere too, Hughes had often commented on how her early, painstakingly systematic poetic process differed from the furious storm of creativity during the months prior to her suicide that resulted in the Ariel poems.11 In the same essay, he writes of a 'deeply secluded mythic and symbolic inner theater accessible to her only in her poetry' (Hughes, 155). The drama played out in this 'theater' is one defined by its exclusions: 'One would like to emphasize even more strongly the weird autonomy of what was going on in there' (Hughes, 155). There is an insistence on a 'hermetic', quasi-biological, or even neurological content of consciousness governed by a mysterious fatality. And indeed, Written on her birthday, “Ariel” continues the theme of the re-identification and rebirth of the narrator. She writes of becoming one with her galloping horse, Ariel, whose name alludes to the imprisoned Shakespearean sprite and the doomed city of Jerusalem, which also reflects her Jewish roots. The poem can divide into two halves. The first portion, stanzas one through nine, slant towards a sensual, sexual, libertine existence, while in the last seven stanzas the narrator is reborn as “a pure acetylene” (Plath, A. 63).
10 Hughes refers to the “Ariel” voice to as ‘the real thing’. 11 During her first mental breakdown and famous disappearance, Sylvia was subsequently hospitalized and treated with shock therapy. Plath described the hospitalization as "[a] time of darkness, despair, and disillusion-- so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be--symbolic death, and numb shock--then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." This was followed by a suicide attempt in 1953 and six months of intensive therapy.
165
12 The "religious man," Eliade writes, "is projected into a vital plane that shows him the fundamental data of human existence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surrounding world.”
Dr.Ann Skea notes:13
“Sylvia, in her journal entries for July 6, 14 and 19, 1953, in The Bell Jar and in her story 'Tongues of Stone' (267-74), describes her own crisis at the age of 20 in just such terms: she writes of her acute horror at the electrocution of the Rosenbergs, her increasing alienation from and isolation from the surrounding world, and of her own knowledge that something was wrong with her. It was this distress, isolation and knowledge which led her to attempt suicide in 1953. And it was this unsuccessful suicide attempt which she later regarded as the 'death' which would bring about the birth of her new creative self. 'The Tender Place', however, begins not with Sylvia's suicide attempt, but with the electric shock treatment which followed it. It is a terrible and frightening version of events which Sylvia herself described in The Bell Jar (p.117 - 174), in 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams' (33) and in her poems 'The Hanging Man' (141-2) and 'Poem for a Birthday' (136-7). Every one of these descriptions finds echoes in the act of self-wounding and subsequent dismemberment which begins shamanic initiation. And often the spirit which calls the shaman to his or her vocation is, according to Eliade, an ancestor "who takes possession of the initiate" (Eliade, Shamanism , pp.22, 82).”
12 Taken from the photo archive of the artist Sabrina King on Flickr. See- http://www.flickr.com/photos/abaigeal/761408924/ 13 "Poetry and Magic - The Hierophant." Pacific Internet Australia . 1 June 2008 http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Hieroph.htm .
Plath Profiles 166
Often the spirit that calls the shaman to his or her vocation is, according to Eliade, an ancestor "who takes possession of the initiate." In her poem “Daddy” Sylvia describes her suicide attempt as an effort to get back to her father.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two I was ten when they buried you At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. (Plath, Poems, p-31)
In Plath’s corpus, the idea that the dead father or some ruined figure withheld knowledge or the magic that would release poetry is persistent and every period of creative sterility in her life would produce a poem/poems evoking this dead/ruined but always absent figure. 14 During 1961-62, Plath made her creative block the subject of her poems when this figure took attributes of Plath’s own father (his physical as well as German ancestry) as well as those her husband and what unfolds slowly is a mythic drama in which the father-husband –male figure is a particular demon to be confronted with. At the time of her father's death, Sylvia saw him as a god. Not ready to be without a father, Plath was unable to let go of his memory. In order to get back to him, she felt as though she had to resurrect him and then kill him a second time. Identification, both with the father, as well as with Hughes and the ambiguity of her feelings for both men is succinctly expressed through powerful images of violence in “Daddy”, a poem written during this period. Plath recreates an image of villagers dancing and stomping on the dead vampire, drawing upon Germanic myth.
Thor’s voice its very self
14 See also “Little Fugue”.
167
Doing a hammer-dance on Daddy’s body, Avenging the twenty-year forsaken Sobs of Germania … (Plath, Poems, 31)
Dr. Ann Skea suggests, 15 “it is the Father God's "thunderbolt" which crashes into Sylvia's skull in “The Tender Place” and his "lightnings" which terrify her. The oak limb is like "your Daddy's leg." All these images find parallels in shamanic lore where, in the initiatory ordeal that follows the shamanic 'death', the shaman is dismembered, reduced by demons and then re-born from bones. Thor, the Father regularly uses his magic hammer, Mjolnir , to re-animate bones. And Thor's tree, the Oak, which is sacred in many European and Scandinavian cultures, is like the Cosmic Tree from which the shamanic drum is made. It is the shaman's own songs and poems that made to the music and rhythm of this drum creates the ecstasy that allows the shaman to fly to the “Otherworld” for healing energies … Plath’s writing her own imaginative account of her shamanic journey in “Poem for a Birthday” makes the electric shock treatment, “volt upon volt,” (Plath, “The Stones”) part of the reconstruction of herself, rather than a dismemberment. And her rebirth is complete, whereas, Ted, in “The Tender Place” however, sees the treatment as wholly destructive:
What went up Vaporized? Where the lightning rods wept copper And the nerve threw off its skin Like a new-born child (Hughes, “The Tender Place”, Birthday Letters )
Sylvia, in this imagery, is left as a conductor of raw energy, dangerously unprotected and with "scorched-earth scars" which were still apparent years later. In this poem, Sylvia's initiation, her poetic journey, is just beginning. Yet, in spite of her vulnerability, she seemed driven to continue. In 'Sylvia Plath and her Journals', Ted describes the process as having a "weird autonomy", as if her poetry was "a secret crucible, or rather a womb, an almost biological process - and just as much beyond her manipulative interference. And like a pregnancy selfish with her resources"
15 "Poetry and Magic - The Hierophant." Pacific Internet Australia . 1 June 2008, http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Hieroph.htm .
Plath Profiles 168
The concept of Pan is a question worth looking at this position. 16 Pan, was a word which had special meaning for Ted and Sylvia in another context, for Pan was the name of the Ouija spirit they had summoned to find poetic subjects. Perhaps an example of what Hughes regarded as “thinking”, it had produced a suggestion that Plath writes a poem about Lorelei. Plath writes in Letters Home - “This has never occurred to me consciously as a subject, and it seemed a good one. The Germanic legend background, the water-images, the death-wish and so on. So, the next day, I begun a poem about them and Pan … it is one of my favorites” (p- 346) . It is significant to note that Pan is the magician, the trickster, but also a son of the sky god and associated especially with the orphic mysteries of shamanic death and rebirth, connected to fertility and season of spring.
A significant departure also is “The Bee Meeting” which seems to suggest a strange initiation into which Sylvia is brought into, to cover her fear and her sense of loneliness: "I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me? Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock..." The imagery of this initiation points to surgery, as if she is being transformed somehow, her old self placed in the "long white box in the grove". Chapter Seven of Rudolf Steiner's fourth mystery drama, The Soul's Awakening ,17 describes the process of Plath attending a cultic rite as a neophyte luminously. God's golden child, the ego of Sylvia Plath, must be united with the spiritual power of the bee hive. In her journals, Plath describes the externals of this event, the vivid remembrances that her conscious mind had perceived. Three days before writing "The Bee Meeting," Plath composed the famous "A Birthday Present" (providing the psychological "bridge" between "Poem for a Birthday" and the "Bees" sequence). In it, Plath reveals that she, like the Virgin Mary, is slated for an "annunciation" -- a mystical insemination -- and that the unwrapped, mysterious "birthday present" is, ideally, her own death. The poem, on the other hand, is a record of the psychic realities of the meeting and encompasses subconscious awareness in addition to her conscious memories. Plath was "chosen" and prepared for this event. Her father, was the "Maestro of Bees" and under his foot, she could feel the weight and gravity of the Earth and feel akin to the mineral kingdom. Her father helped her to incarnate, to be part of the world and to act in the world. After the initiation, she would become the airy spirit, Ariel, whose spiritual flight would mimic the Queen Bee, the most solar of creatures whose gestation period occurs wholly within the time of one solar revolution. One of the most fertile creatures on Earth, the
16 See also “The Pan,” a poem Hughes wrote for the collection Birthday Letters. 17 Rudolf Steiner, Four Mystery Dramas. Rudolf Steiner Press.Translated by Ruth and Hans Pusch.
169
Queen Bee almost literally mates with the Sun, and the drones must follow her on her dizzying trip and the successful drone must die as his body disintegrates during this solar flight. After the trip to the Sun, the Queen returns to the hive to lay tens of thousands of eggs, enough to supply the hive for an entire season. Likewise, after careful preparation, the Egyptian neophyte is lifted out of his physical body in a near death experience. He wears what Steiner refers to as the “etheric body.” His greatest materiality is now in the bodily processes, a nonmaterial body that exists in the world of pure ideas. Here we experience ideas as "buzzing" entities as our inner life becomes a swarming horde of bees that surrounds us. The villagers make Plath "one of them" by altering her "garments." Her physical and form- giving "bodies" are prepared and taken to the buzzing hives of the etheric world, the world where time processes are dense materiality. The smoke of the spirit penetrates the virgin etheric hive and the "I" or ego of Plath must experience the buzzing ideas directly. Thought flies like "hysterical elastics" and the "I" attempts to remain hidden and not to interact with these entities. The initiators effect the merger of Plath's ego with the old Queen bee but the spiritual flight is somehow interrupted and Plath's exhausted ego must ponder her transformation and her body's lack of heat. Finally she foresees that this initiation will require her actual physical death and that she must permanently take leave of her present incarnation. And yet for Sylvia this initiation eventually represents her queenly resumption of power, her renewal of flesh and spirit after the "Wintering", with her old self placed in the "long white box in the grove."
I am exhausted, I am exhausted - Pillar of white in a blackout of knives. I am the magician's girl who does not flinch. The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands. Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold. (Plath, "The Bee Meeting".)
Plath Profiles 170
18
The error of thy sense of self be burned in fire, enkindled in this rite for thee. Burn thou thyself with substance of thine error. (Plath,"The Bee Meeting")
Hughes gives Plath’s transformation a mythic shape in his Birthday Letters , which adds to his idealized autobiography, an account of Sylvia Plath as the instigator of his journey to the land of the dead, from which he emerged as a shaman. His poem published in Birthday Letters entitled “Visit”, offers a dramatic version of the way that journey began and describes the return of Plath from the grave into his living consciousness as a creative force.
Ten years after your death
18 Sylvia Plath's grave, Heptonstall taken by the artist Felix Macpherson on February 21, 2007. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/leafhouse/398988871/ .
171
I meet on a page of your journal, as never before… Your actual words, as they floated Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page… I look up – as if to meet your voice With all its urgent future That has burst in on me … (Hughes, “Visit” in Birthday Letters )
In “Poetry Matters”19 , Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick writes-
“In Poetic Licence 20 , Helen Carr argues that poetry's identification with feeling and subjectivity is valuable in cultures that fear emotion and value the apparently objective and transparent discourses of science and theory. A feminist embrace of the ‘degraded’ realm of feeling allows Carr to employ Native American oral poetry as an example of performed ritual that produces healing and to draw parallels with the practice of contemporary poetry. For Carr, poets enact transformations in their poems to produce them for their audience through "finding a way by which contradictions and confusions can be set down by finding words that draw the inchoate into signification" (Carr, 91); and the poet, like the shaman, uses her creativity to speak for more than herself/himself, producing cultural artifacts that are "both pleasurable and empowering" (Carr, 95).”
The early shamans went on their own pilgrimages, discovering through their visions a cosmic order containing love and joy, and then returned to their own communities to restore the society's shattered rites so that this vision could be ritualistically presented to everyone in the community. The shaman, Eliade tells us, recalls a lost paradise and presents visions of that paradise in terms of epiphanies of love and cosmic order and joy. Plath might not be shamanic in the same way as those early shamans that Eliade describes in his many works and yet, she serves many a shamanic functions, chief among them writing a poetry that can be healing, or even redemptive .Her personal, traumatic experiences, are recognized, grieved over and healed. Transformed into poetry they serve as the medium both within the realm of
19 NWSA Journal , Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2002 20 Carr, Helen. 'Poetic Licence' in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World .
Plath Profiles 172 the individual poet as well as her community of readers and become medium for survival both within individuals and across generations. . “Traumatic memories are encoded not narratively but in images and feelings, both emotional and physical. Thus, the traumatic experience cannot be directly referred to but must be remembered, reconstructed, and worked through indirectly in an address with another. This is why poetry allows us to witness as survivors to having survived and to witness others' survival: poetry, like trauma, takes images, feelings, rhythms, sounds, and the physical sensations of the body as evidence. (Carr, 3).”
173
Works Cited
Aird, Eileen M. Sylvia Plath (The Modern writers series) . London: Oliver And Boyd, 1973. Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath (Twayne's United States Authors Series; Tusas 309) . New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1998. Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath: Second Edition . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness: A Biography . Toronto: Schaffner Press, 2004. Carr, Helen. 'Poetic Licence' in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World . London and New York: Pandora Pr, 1990. Contemporary Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Bollingen Series (General)) . Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Faas, Ekbert. Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe. . Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980 Haberkamp, Frederike. Sylvia Plath: Poetics of Beekeeping (Salzburg Studies in English Literature. Poetic Drama & Poetic Theory, 192) . Portland: International Specialized Book Services, 1997. Halifax, Ph.D - Joan. Shamanic Voices -. New York: E.P. Dutton Publishing, 1979. Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters . New York City: Faber Faber, 2002. Kirkpatrick, Kathryn J. “Poetry Matters” NWSA Journal, Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2002, pp. 185-195 Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath . Seattle: The History Press, 2007. Libby, Anthony. “God's Lioness and the Priest of Sycorax: Plath and Hughes”. Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 3. (Summer, 1974): pp. 386-405. Plath, Sylvia Poems , Classic Poetry Series, PoemHunter.Com - Thousands of poems and poets. Poetry Search Engine .15 May 2008
Plath Profiles 174
Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation . Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Scigaj, Leonard M.. The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986. Spivey, Ted R. The Writer As Shaman . Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987. Steiner, Rudolf. Four Mystery Dramas: The Portal of Initiation, the Soul's Probation, the Guardian of the Threshold, the Soul's Awakening . New York: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1998. Ted Hughes, 'Sylvia Plath and her Journals', in Alexander, Paul (Ed.). Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath . New York: Harper & Row, 1985. Uroff, Margaret. Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. "On Shamans." Dreams of the Great Earth Changes . 2 June 2008, http://www.greatdreams.com/shamans.htm . Corbet David. “The Shaman in Academia: ritual, metaphor and transformation in the arts ” , a paper presented at the ACLA Conference 2007,Puebla, Mexico 19-21 April retrieved from-"Le Flâneur: April 2007." Le Flâneur . 2 June 2008, http://bundeenablog.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html . "Sylvia Plath, Bee Poems, Ariel, and Initiation in Ancient Egypt." Ego, Blood, and Spirit . 1 June 2008, http://moonchalice.com/initiation2.html . "Poetry and Magic - The Hierophant." Pacific Internet Australia . 1 June 2008, http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Hieroph.htm . "Sylvia Plath - Robert Robbins Essay." Yahoo! GeoCities: Get a free web site with easy-to- use site building tools . 1 June 2008, http://www.geocities.com/rrobbins.geo/plath.htm . "Sylvia Plath Forum: home page." Sylvia Plath Forum: home page . 1 June 2008, http://www.sylviaplathforum.com . "Sylvia Plath on Flickr - Photo Sharing!" Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing . 2 June 2008, http://flickr.com/photos/69495898@N00/224585635/ . "Sylvia Plath on Flickr - Photo Sharing!" Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing . 2 June 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/abaigeal/761408924 . "Sylvia Plath on Flickr - Photo Sharing!" Welcome to Flickr - Photo Sharing . 2 June 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/leafhouse/398988871/ .