Sylvia Plath Lane, Gary Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Lane, Gary. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.71831. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/71831 [ Access provided at 28 Sep 2021 05:02 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. HOPKINS OPEN PUBLISHING ENCORE EDITIONS Gary Lane, ed. Sylvia Plath New Views on the Poetry Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press Published 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. CC BY-NC-ND ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3532-9 (open access) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3532-2 (open access) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3530-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3530-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-3531-2 (electronic) ISBN-10: 1-4214-3531-4 (electronic) This page supersedes the copyright page included in the original publication of this work. The frontispiece for this book, entitled "The spirit of blackness is in us," is from a lithograph by Louis Lubbering and was commissioned by the author for this work. Copyright '° 1979 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, xerography, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Manufactured in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-20515 ISBN 0-8018-2179-7 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed page of this book. For Franny and Bart Introduction ix 1. Achievement and value Calvin Bedient Sylvia Plath, romantic ... 3 ]. D. McClatchy Short circuits and folding mirrors 19 Hugh Kenner Sincerity kills 33 David Shapiro Sylvia Plath: drama and melodrama 45 2. Process and influence Richard Allen Blessing The shape of the psyche: vision and technique in the late poems of Sylvia Plath 57 vii Contents ]. D. O'Hara Plath's comedy 74 Sister Bernetta Quinn Medusan imagery in Sylvia Plath 97 Gary Lane Influence and originality in Plath's poems 116 BarnettGuttenberg Plath's cosmology and the house of Yeats 138 3. Personal and public contexts Marjorie Perloff Sylvia Plath's "Sivvy" poems: a portrait of the poet as daughter 155 Murray M. Schwartz and Christopher Bo/las The absence at the center: Sylvia Plath and suicide 179 Carole Ferrier The beekeeper's apprentice 203 Jerome Mazzara Sylvia Plath and the cycles of history 218 Sylvia Plath: a selected bibliography of primary and secondary materials 241 Contributors 253 Index of Sylvia Plath's works 257 General index 261 viii 1. Sylvia Plath is one of the most controversial poets of our time-and she is more. Plath has grown into a cult figure, a dramatic presence whose dramatic absence-her suicide at thirty-shrouded the woman and her work in conjecture's cloak of holes. For some she became the symbol of woman oppressed, albeit by cultural forces rather than the physical brutality she sometimes invokes; others saw her as the triumphant victim of her own intensity, the authentic poet pursuing sensation to that ultimate, exciting uncertainty, death; for still others she became in retrospect the doomed innocent, undone by a sensibility too acute for our gross physical world. But the list of projected Plaths might go on for pages: everyone, it seems, has his own version of the Sylvia Plath myth. Such mythologizing affects everything about the poet, including criti­ cism of her work. In 1970 Mary Kinzie found Plath criticism divided sharply into two periods, with the poet's death, on 11 February 1963, marking the turning point. The early criticism, "reviews of The Colossus had been brief, reserved, entirely conventional."1 and The Bell Jar[,] The next period, through and beyond the book in which Kinzie's remarks appeared, was devoted to revaluation and canonization. ix Introduction Plath's suicide and the publication two years later of evinced Ariel something very like poetic sainthood, recoloring the earlier work and lending the whole enterprise an austere pallor of immortality. Critics who, lacking the evidence of the later poems, had not heard all of course that lay submerged beneath now found the overlooked The Colossus, meanings embarrassingly plain. Even so acute a reader as Richard Howard, in an essay that remains one of the most perceptive discussions of Plath, found himself beginning with a public confession of earlier blindness: "The first review I ever wrote of a book of poems was of first book of her poems, that breviary of estrangement ..., .. , and in my The Colossus . account ...of these well-behaved, shapely poems by a summa cum laude graduate of Smith who had worked as a guest editor of Mademoiselle and won a Fulbright to Newnham, the wife of Ted Hughes and the mother of two children, I missed a lot- I had no premonition of what was coming."2 Plath ascended. We need but mark Howard's italicized his recitation of biographical details, to gauge the tenor of that "her," second period of Plath criticism. The past five or six years have seen the emergence of more measured consideration and the arrival of several book-length studies, but the balanced appraisal Plath needs has not yet appeared. Edward Butscher's gossipy, oversimplifying "critical biography," Sylvia Plath: Method and is at best cursory in its criticism and nowhere captures a poet. Madness, David Holbrook's reductive psychoanalytic study, Sylvia Plath: Poetry conceals its occasional insights among a forest of Freudean and Existence, trees; there are so many more pricks than kicks that we lose track of the kicks almost entirely. Even the most informative scholarly study to appear, Judith Kroll's Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia considerably overextends its quite useful research, fitting all of Plath, Plath's poems to a thesis that can cover only some of them. There is a strong calling, then, for the present collection. Not yet the unified, full, and just evaluation that Plath deserves, it is nevertheless a movement by committee to that end, a diversity of carefully formulated praise and blame, analysis and contextualization, from which serious students and later evaluators can usefully draw. The book is divided into three parts, Achievement and Value, Process and Influence, Personal and Public Contexts; by no means hermetic, these sections nevertheless represent the broadly differing approaches of aesthetic overview, technical examination, and biographical and historical connection. With a single exception, all of the essays were commissioned for this book. And all of them were able to draw on materials that most earlier commentators lacked: a substantial body of Plath's poems and prose, a moderately detailed biographical record, and an important selection of the poet's correspondence. X Introduction 2 Because the essence of this book lies in the demonstration of its writers' claims, which, I think, are carried out in exceptionally rich and diverse ways, little of these essays' thunder will be stolen by summarizing and introducing them. Such a summary has its uses: it will serve as a process of abstracting for those readers who are determined to pursue only certain inquiries; it will suggest both the shape and the voices of the book; and it may help the thoroughly involved reader, laboring to assimilate many, sometimes unfamiliar examples, keep the arguments straight. Part one begins with Calvin Bedient's admiring demonstration of Plath's romanticism. Bedient finds Plath's thought unimportant and her sensibility -exhaustingly consumed in contradiction, overvulnerable-primarily useful in helping us recognize our own complicity in it. He locates Plath's importance in intensity-"she became our second queen (poor queen, mad queen) of subjectivity" -and his essay is an exceptionally sensitive characterization of the subjective drama of Plath's poetry. J. D. McClatchy's valuation is also high, but somewhat different. For him, Plath is a period poet, one "whose sensibilities uniquely captured -and whose work continues to recover for later readers-[her] contempo­ rary culture's tone, values, and issues." Like Bedient, McClatchy sees little importance in Plath's subjects; for him, however, her importance resides in a "rapidly evolving relationship to style," and he traces that evolution from the traditionalism of the poems to the taut new purity of Colossus with its "abundance and abandon," its "sense of autopsy." Plath, he Ariel, concludes, is an innovator as important as Lowell or Roethke in her "ex­ periments with voice and the relationships among tone and image and address." Hugh Kenner puts a damper on the enthusiasm for Plath. Marking the precision and control of the early poems, he finds that the intricate formalism of "detained her mind upon the plane of craft, The Colossus and so long as it was detained there it did not slip toward what beckoned it." Kenner sees great promise in that first book-had she developed its ways of working, "it is a plausible guess that the arc of her development might have easily exceeded Lowell's" -but finds the promise betrayed by the "bogus spirituality" of the poems.