AMERICAN POETRY • She is self-consciously shocking; element of sensationalism about her work also • Not just the subject matter; also about form, style, presentation of the self in terms of subject matter • It was her death 11/02/63 that really sparked interest in her poetry and transformed her into a cultish figure • Suicide takes on the significance of a literary act; The culmination seemingly of her most recent poems and journal entries • these final poems, published posthumously as the collection ‘’(1965) were initially apprehended as a psychic unleashing or release = read in biographical terms • Almost impossible to clearly distinguish between life traumas and the trauma of creativity; challenging boundaries about biography, trauma, life trauma and the trauma of writing • Plath’s poetry is continually re-drawing boundaries; those of life and art, personal pain, moments of historical crisis; her work is embedded in a poetics of privacy but also public exposure or revelation of interiority – • ‘Medusa’: ‘overexposed like an x-ray’ can be just about herself as well as her/a mother figure • Plath’s Relationship to confessional poetry is highly complex and problematic; linking her style with that of Robert Lowell and John Berryman Plath’s poems and stories never open a transparent window onto her lived experience. They make verbal spectacles of that experience, transforming it into something rich and strange. (Steven Axelrod) o verbal spectacles is important when we are thinking about Plath; o this emphasis on spectacle, refocuses our own attention from content to device o from subject to thinking about form and tech; we see this relationship between verbal and visual spectacle in the poem ‘’; ‘Lady Lazarus’ • Interesting poem in relation to this; self-consciously sensational poem • It Stages and makes a spectacle of suicide; the act of death and revival, or being brought back from the brink of death is turned into a poetic theatre • There is a sense of objectification of a female body; but a body that is scarred, and imperfect- these imperfections that attract the crowd • The body which is initially deemed to be trash, and easily annihilated becomes object of desire and degradation at the same time • Perversely valuable commodity; curiosity; opus, pure gold baby; these are just some of the ways in which she brings together both verbal and visual spectacle. • The death worms become sticky pearls- beauty verging on the grotesque; a king of self-elegy, transformed into a Keatsian element of beauty • The female body, spectacle are once more indivisible in a vivid theatre The form of Plath’s poetry • When she is writing is important; she is beginning to write in the shadow of the great modernists, looming edifices for Plath; she is acutely aware through this of some of the limitations of women in the literary world; we can see this in ‘colossus’ • Much of her Poetry explores the pernicious pervasiveness of patriarchy; the oppressive bonds of the father/husband fig, male fig, general embodiments of male tyranny = seen as a feminist writer; this focus on what one might see as women’s victimhood, rage and rebellion • Her poetic voice re-enacts female experience as crushing and devastating but there is also a kind of sardonic playfulness which has a kind of hope to it • During her most ferocious and vitriolic times she is also tender; a lyric delicacy • What is also important in her poetry is the disturbing power of myth; the ways in which she draws on myth; this is often interrelated with her interest in psychoanalysis , particularly Freud; his influence on Plath is fundamental- especially in her poems about family relationships , but also more generally as well

• ‘Metaphors’ 1 I’m a riddle in nine syllables, 2 An elephant, a ponderous house, 3 A melon strolling on two tendrils. 4 O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! 5 This loafs big with its yeasty rising. 6 Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath 7 I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. 8 I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, 9 Boarded the train there’s no getting off. (Sylvia Plath, ‘Metaphors’, 20 March 1959) o written on the 25th March 1959 o the poem demonstrates an overriding preoccupation with form and linguistic complexity o the poem is a kind of riddle; in that kind of sardonic sparsity, there are links back to Emily Dickinson; 9 lines, each with 9 syllables o the series of metaphors conveying size, sense of expansion, culminating in the blatant image of the cow in calf = poem about pregnancy; that imagery and fecundity normally is normally associated with pregnancy but the use of it by Plath is rather unsettling; that image of line 3= o something almost unnatural about describing a natural function o even more disconcerting is the rising yeast which is preceded by the economic metaphor of line 6; o As the poem is the means the stage for Plath’s poetic virtuosity, so her expertise in form and language are displayed in a belaboured, obviously self-conscious manner o the female body as a ponderous house literally pregnant with meaning o poetic act and female experience colliding; this act of cross-fertilisation is not smooth = both the female body and the poem become somewhat predictable and blatant; o as the poetic voice is controlled and measured by form, so the body becomes another vehicle, inhabited by a secondary purpose and being o the figure of the pregnant woman, the latent host of something not yet revealed, as yet unrealised is the very essence of metaphor; the poem is self-reflective in multiple ways (some which are obvious and more which are far more compelling ways) o wonderful symbiosis about the poem; a kind of symmetry, and a harmony but an unsettling and uncomfortable relationship between form and subject o element of constraint about the poem is palpable; a confinement associated with pregnancy; claustrophobia o the consumption of apples – symbolic of woman’s fall, and leading to an inevitable destination = the curse and fate of motherhood. o Working in terms of the ultimate product of pregnancy but also how the poem will have to end; both of these things are inevitable = fatalism to the poem. • ‘Tulips’ The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. 2 Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. 3 I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly 4 As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. 5 I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. 6 I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses 7 And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. 8 They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff 9 Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. 10 Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. 11 The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, 12 They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, 13 Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, 14 So it is impossible to tell how many there are. 15 My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water 16 Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. 17 They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. 18 Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage — 19 My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, 20 My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; 21 Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath 22 I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat 23 Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. 24 They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. 25 Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley 26 I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books 27 Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. 28 I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. 29 I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted 30 To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. 31 How free it is, you have no idea how free — 32 The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, 33 And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. 34 It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them 35 Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. 36 The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. 37 Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe 38 Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. 39 Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. 40 They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, 41 Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, 42 A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. 43 Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. 44 The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me 45 Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, 46 And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow 47 Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, 48 And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. 49 The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. 50 Before they came the air was calm enough, 51 Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. 52 Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. 53 Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river 54 Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. 55 They concentrate my attention, that was happy 56 Playing and resting without committing itself. 57 The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. 58 The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; 59 They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, 60 And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes 61 Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. 62 The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, 63 And comes from a country far away as health. (‘Tulips’, 18 March 1961) o A poem exploring the relationship between poetic voice, female experience and the subject at the centre; poem of 1961 often thought to be a kind of transitional work o intellectual abstraction is merged again with personal pain; the occasion for the poem was Plath’s hospitalisation (after a miscarriage- receiving tulips) o the poem opens with an immediate disjunction between speaker and subject; the red tulips puncture the white quietude of winter – something reminiscent of the wasteland o the image of the self as snowed in- claustrophobic and contained, there is a willed constructiveness in the half line: ‘I am learning peacefulness’ o the speaker’s desire to ‘efface myself’ at odds with the assertiveness of the first-person pronoun o There is a simultaneous self-assertion and self-admigation AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath o the self as a stage; female body laid out; the eye is also positioned, passively perceiving the outer world- the images just moving across this passive eye; almost sacrificial prose o laborious stage managing the separation of vision and external environment; facilitated by the pain of detachment, the female body o Plath’s tulips are another version of Keats nightingale- the poem longs for oblivion, the drowsy numbness, to be brought back to consciousness by the poetic subject o the evacuation or freezing of self is prevented by the violent visceral dramatic entrance of the tulips; they draw the speaker’s; they oppressive in their redness o the subject of the poem becomes a malevolent alter ego; animates the imagination; stimulating sensation; producing the effect of stigmata- animated or spiritual awakening but not something welcomed by the speaker o attention is diverted from the anaesthetised body to the subject and focus of the tulips; they exert gravitational pull on the speaker and the reader o the poetic voice that has tried to remain independent of surroundings of life has found a focus; this is an inevitability announced by the title of the poem. o The relationship between self and subject is not straightforward; concord develops as the subject triggers a consciousness of self; the speaker then interprets this as being self-determining o The subject reaffirms a life of sensation; the speaker reminds us that she has been brought back to an existence far from health; no miraculous recovery o This pathology of the female body as connected to the process and forms of poetry is a persistent concern for Plath, often related to natural objects, colours, illness • Forms of poetry an important to Plath; related to natural objects/illness • ‘Poppies in July’ o there is also a companion piece called ‘poppies in october’ o the flowers are as captivating and as ambivalent as the tulips; the poppies invoke the senses; they are flames evading the touch yet nothing burns o visually the poppy is exhausting, the senses confused, unsettled – the only residue that remains is the disturbing sense of a wound = correspondence between self and subject o the mouth also becomes bloodied in this poem; poppies as visual tropes/aural conduits for sleep, death, desire o subtle change in evolution in terms of the companion poem; extension of ideas and metaphors in poppies in October • What Plath generates through the creative representation of the female body and its relationship with the red flowers is the subversion of romantic expectations in terms of love poetry, as well as Romantic expectations; thinking about poetic tradition • disconcerting disjunctions being made here are evident in ‘elm’ o the moon is merciless; not reflecting the fertility of the female body; described as scathing it; image of sunset- another romantic image o use of the word atrocity; shocks us into a sense of why? • ‘letter in November’ o starting with the word love; world plunged into winter, frozen but the eye is drawn (gravitational pull of the eye onto a subject) to a pervasive green in the air o excitable almost giddy enjoyment in the natural world; something quite surreal in the poem; this frozen arctic world suffused with green and red, technicolour landscape – also a very sensuous experience culminating in startling colour; the crimson leading the speaker to the green of the holly o trees – persistent trope in Plath’s poetry; rooting personal memory and situating it and tapping into a deeper resonant history – ritual of placing her own garden, private space, bring her to the trees bearing fruit o the speaker imagines these trees as a living history of the dead o described as the wall of old corpses – we expect it to be copse; brought to imagine these trees as bleeding mouths; brave slaughtered warriors o Plath takes us on a personal path from light effects into a landscape of ancient conflict, the gaping wound of death served up as a savage marvel for the living o we are thinking about landscape and place (placing the self within a history; literary and literal) • ‘Wuthering Heights’ AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath o landscape seems to become more foreboding, even gothic in this poem o poem of 1961, same year as tulips o Plath had previously written on the topic in 1957; Plath and Hughes wrote a series of poems on this site from a stay in Yorkshire; the sense of potentially being lost or apprehensive in the dark of the moors V differing responses to bleak isolation and the relationship it has with the poetic self, tradition and place o Plath’s poems are in dialogue as the inaccessible hinterland of Emily Brontë’s novel o depicts a land beyond, on margins of human existence that channels Brontë’s interest in liminality o wind blowing- reminiscent of the opening description of the heights o active resistance of absorption in the landscape; sense of incorporation into the landscape but also alienation form a site that only remembers a few odd syllables (16-17) o something interesting happening here that is different to Hughes; Plath has an anxiety about being an outsider, looking in V Hughes growing up in Yorkshire V Plath experiencing landscape as an adult American o it is clear from the beginning of the poem that this is a visited as well as psychic landscape o bringing together of a known, visited landscape; also, a psychic landscape; the horizons encircle the speaker with the promise of sunset, but the defining limits are always unstable and dissolving o the interiority of the speaker is under threat, indistinct o also, ludicrous before the speaker; the speaker however standing firm, the only vertical among all horizontals; line 37 – imaginative burden, mode of isolation and support; something self-sustaining but also something that potentially could rob the voice o something solidifying the speaker against all this instability; the speaker is confronting the outside world; desperate need for the landscape to acknowledge her presence

• amongst the aesthetic tensions, ambitions, the pain, we shouldn’t overlook the beauty of Plath’s verse • 30th birthday; poems intensified – nearly a poem a day; amongst these poems were among her most self- revelatory • apex of confessional poetry: ’’ ; use of Nazi imagery, references to the holocaust – complicated domestic relationships with father figure; remaining controversial due to atrocity of poetic reference and sensationalism • Plath finding forms and formulated discourse to formulate pain; transpose the beauty of pain of the individual onto the trauma of the landscape; interconnected with literary tradition; poetic history of private loss • re-writing the limits of modern poetry.

• About how it connects to her novels, journals, theoretical, philosophical implication • Foregrounding subjectivity; this is why her work is considered to be confessional; excessively subjective • Anne Stevenson: ‘cursed’ • She must find a way out • Does not seem to find a way out of subjectivityty of selfhood- she strengthens her selfhood; poetry preserves the life of subjectivity that rerfuses to meet moralistic rules and standards • Refusal to stifle the idiosyncrasy of selfhood; scandal of poetry – subjectivity is a political act; you flatten yourself in your refusal to become like other • Notorious poems; do not achieve a transcendence of selfhood • Quotation 1; electra complex; this description ot eh poem emphasises clinical self-distance; victim of disordered psyche; psychoanalysical literature towards her persona; Jungian models • Her persona is not autobiographical; subjectivity does not mean this – it has to do with how the self perceives the world • ‘Daddy’ not to do with autobiography; not confessional in terms of the autobiographical; vibrating the tension between distance, and closesness; poetic human and emotive force of the poem • quotation 2; ‘last horror’ meaning the holocaust; both histrionic and arty; private of subjective experience comes to the public; the poem voices and imagines subjectivity which becomes overwhelmed by reality; the oppression of the outside reality of substance goes under the name of father; subjectivity crushed by the force of all that is • ‘complicated’ – detached position; what does it mean that god is a nazi; this is a travesty of traditional conventions of monotheistic deity • ridiculous aspect; the poem’s tone is infantile; interrelation between vowel repetition AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath • ‘shoe’ ‘Jew’ rhymes; Freudian context • The pleasure principle; way of controlling reality – quotation 3 • The persona of the poem has to kill her father in order to avoid subjectivity being crushed by him; compulsion to kill for freedom – quotations 4 and 5 • I am through can also be read as a kind of transparency; seen through; monopoly of sexual intercourse and homogony of father figure - patricide; performing the liberation of an oppressed daughter • Scandalous and offensive way – attaches the Nazi to overbearing to homogenising authority figures = offensive • Validate th subjectivity of his patients; Freudian concepts of the homogeneity of the id – appalling and offensive offerings • Addresses the production of fantasy as such, although potentially insightful - where does this production of fantasy take place? Mechanism of the production of fantasy • This fantasy of the almighty father collapses at the point of its enunciation at the poem – quotation 6 ; father collapses into the prude Nazism • Quasi-divine patriarchy; interrupts its own inflation of infantile babble • Putting an end to the fantasies form which it has derived its own stifled existence • Mocking and comical voice- poetic voice is ridiculous; cancels itself out to make room for something else – enacts and witnesses a death of a self confined to stasis • Quotation 7; the image of the arrow = freedom of oppression; validates subjectivity; homogenous darkness to which it returns • Transformations of subjectivity ; takes issue with conformity and homogeneity; hrsh brilliance; tough style of poetry • Struggle with homogeneity is feminist; intertextual arrow, reference to Bell Jar – stasis within a patriarchy • Quotation 8 from – persona wants to turn into the arrow itself; passive and static Launchpad; stasis is a state of mind imposed on individuality- form of imprisonment. • Plath’s poems not about the self – socio-economic pressures to hide • Imperfect resurrection of the psyche pulled back unwillingly to the hypocrisies of health (quotation 9) • Creating new public space of freedom • Focusing on the ways in which we lie and deceive other and ourselves in order to conform to social rules/expectations – we acclaim the fabrications of representations that cover us like clothes (quotation 9) • We mask our past in the green of Eden • Intensity deriving from the aspects of existence; enjambment; alliterating and grave statement of darkness • This harsh truth must not enter public consciousness; avid reader of Freud ; aspects of life – point of and for offence – rigidity of nude flesh, body’s demarcation- material form of subjectivity = body; shared constitution of life which is =sharing existence • Masterly downplaying the public dimension of the private bath – ‘tale of a tub’ • The uncovering; privacy of the bath becomes place of enquiry; idiosyncratic; covet harshness of selfhood • Quotation 10- poetry makes us see the public truth; facades of public; intoxicated, plastered – poetry’s sobriety contrasts with the intoxicated perception of conformity • Elevated truth of poetry; Plath’s poetry is sober in relation to its background • Determination to find voice through a harshness; offending social niceties • Quotation 11; ambition has less to do with outward recognition – new style of writing • Quotation 12 • Taboo denotes what society deems to be dangerous; untouchable; outcast; dangerous; fixity of stylistic conformity; idiosyncratic experience; fixed and fixated – put into a preformed social cage of Rococo aesthetics; radicalises her subjectivity; quest to find distinctive voice; my own vision • Quest for an inner self- universal undertaking; subjectivity includes many selves; not about herself, but about what she fashions as those who as socially excluded – thought and actions • Comforting cotton wool of blissful ignorance • Combining subjectivity with multiplicity of selfhood; Plath’s self- inclusion of variety of self-hood • The self emerges as a potentially universal entity – about many selves • the covering of self-hood – demands such exclusion is the ‘one size fits all’ approach • parallelism between Plath’s search for conventional style AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath • quotation 13- conceptions of selfhood succumb to preordained gender rules; ethical norms system; passive female – inevitability; she cannot vacate the ethical sign system of society; poetry emerges as a free space not subject to societal rules and regulations; self-hood can flourish in idiosyncratic ways; homogenous fabric; the act of stepping out of the socio-political is a public one • its publicity manifests itself in scandals • turning of tables- poetry becoming measure of truth and society; governmental rationality • three women – second voice articulates a revulsion with conformity in society; those who rule and govern impose homogeneity • quotation 13 (poetry bit) – flatness; certain continuity between tale of a tub and three women • focus shifting from the exterior to the interior; homogeneity’s constitution – cannot endure the presence of subjectivity; here its face is faceless • the lines establish a tension between idea of sacred and reality of political theology that is oppressive- oppression of this psychological power-all-encompassing force of society’s homogeneity • Kadesh – something standing out as something utterly different; the scared means that which you are not allowed to touch- the holy cannot be flat; the oxymoron of holy flatness- conformity; interaction between father and son- plath taking issue with the religion of theology; the heaven created by the theology of three women • violence of a theology that flattens – ethical connotations; ethics cleans; normativity cleaning society of conduct that is improper; justify the agreement between father and son • crossness embodying that which stands out • Plath taking issue with conformity of consumer society (quotation 14) • Plath focusing on economic pressures; repetition- poetry of life; kernel of ever0different and renewed life • image of the mother- past where the past; conforming pressures of society at large • anger provoked by threats – quotation 15 • self has to be rediscovered • need for and pressure to live a conforming life has its symbolic equivalent in the mother; literary figure • various constructions – interaction with the social world • gender identities and roles; at once feels obligated to conform as wife and mother • emergence of poetry as an alternative to homogeneity • writing poetry is not a life enhancing but also a life generating activity; reciting outside the declamatory structures of roles • quotation 16- way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience – distinction which characterises the interface between public and private- wholly in a non theological sense – poetry sanctifying the profane and elevates what has been considered impure • dedication associated with religion ; quotation 16 • ‘kindness’ - pressures to be conforming; delusions and deceptions which shape our social existence; poetry becomes the letter; Plath celebrating poetry – quotation 17; conflating word and deed- world and poetic word; blood as life; connection between blood and life- roses point to the redness of blood