AMERICAN POETRY Sylvia Plath • 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 ‘Ariel’(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’; ‘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.