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Sylvia Plath

In many ways, it is surprising that Sylvia Plath's poetry has attained the popular and critical acclaim it well-deserves. Radically self-revealing, violent, mystical, and decidedly feminine, if not feminist, in conception and articulation, Plath's poems continue to startle readers with their direct, explosive candor as well as their brilliant finesse with language and superlative use of figurative language. From the very beginning of Sylvia Plath's career as a teenage poet dreaming of publication in Seventeen Magazine while publishing and winning poetry prizes in small literary journals, the combination of mathematical precision in diction and prosody combined with passionate, of emotionally volatile, themes and images characterize the best and most renowned of her poems.

The literary tradition Plath is most closely associated with: Confessionalism, engenders robust biographical interpretation due to the innately self-revelatory idiom. Plath, even more so than other Confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Robert Lowell, explored the poetic possibilities of contemporaneous self-expression which involved intimate, sometimes deeply personal psychological and biographical revelation. This aspect, along with deftly executed figurative language, expressive and interesting prosody, and stark, often violent imagery distinguishes the poems of Plath’s most well-known book of verse, Ariel.

Plath's personal life plays a crucial role in her poetry. The brevity of her life, coupled with its psychological intensity underscores everything in her poetry and colors her work deeply. Plat was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, a man considerably older than her mother, Aurelia, died when Plath was eight years old. Plath later attended Smith College and then Cambridge College on scholarships. In England she met and eventually married the poet Ted Hughes. The poets were married for three years before they separated in 1963. Having previously suffered mental breakdowns during her childhood and college years, Plath committed suicide in February of 1963 in London in a flat which had previously been occupied by the poet William Butler Yeats, (Plath CP).

Though Plath's fame as a poet came largely posthumously, her journals and letter reveal that, in the last stages of her career, she was aware that a breakthrough of some significance had been made in her poetry. She remarked to her mother, in a letter of October 1962 "I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name" (LH, p 468). This famous statement is an important moment in Plath's quite brief literary career because self-doubt and feelings of inferiority, especially as a poet, plagued her incessantly and she was frequently consumed by jealousy and envy toward other poets and writers.

Due to the fact that Plath suicided at the age of thirty, many critics and even devotees of her poetry have maintained that her work suffers from a "sophomoric" quality. Even Hughes, her husband and posthumous editor of her Collected Poems remarks that when she broke through to the voice of the Ariel poems, her last poems, "her real self, being the real poet, would now speak for itself, and would throw off all those lesser and artificial selves that had monopolized the words up to that point, it was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke" (Plath Journal). Despite the lack of immediate or notable prestigious academic acceptance of her work, Plath was published first at the age of eight and continued to publish dozens of poems as well as short stories and articles throughout her teenage and college years.

Plath's early prowess with poetry retains a close affinity with what might be considered the "golden years" of her childhood -- the years before her father died of gangrene. The death of Plath's father has been considered one of the most significant events of her early life and it casts an influence over her poetry as well her life-choices and recurrent psychological "breakdowns" or as she described them "panic attacks" (Plath, Journal). Plath's father, who in life, was a professor of zoology and a renowned expert on bees, rose to occupy a god-like status in Plath's early work -- and a demonic status in her late work. The same is true for her poetic portrayal of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, whose initial god-like status in Plath's poetic imagination, reflected in such poems and "Ode to Ted" and "Man in Black" is eclipsed by the villain of the Ariel poems, featured in "The Jailer" "Fever 103 Degrees" "Gigolo" and "Words Heard by Accident Over The Phone," among others, (Plath CP).

Plath's earliest surviving poems, classified as juvenilia, along with the poems of her first published collection, The Colossus, demonstrate a pattern in Plath's poetry of precise and controlled meter coupled with mythic images and themes, combined to articulate a personal vision, which -- when the poems are successful -- can be apprehended universally. Two poems from the early period, "Sonnet to Satan" and "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" are characteristic of the most powerful examples in Plath's early idiom, which is also notable for a reliance on dense rhetoric and complex syntax.

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In "Sonnet to Satan," Plath employs startling imagery "In darkroom of your eye the moonly mind/ someraults to couterfeit eclipse;/ bright angels black out over logic's land/under shutter of their handicaps" where the scope of the poem is epic, although it's form -- as a sonnet -- is concise and mathematical. Some 0f the phrasing in the poem is daring: "Steepling snake in that contrary light/ invades the dilate lens of genesis" where the alliteration of "steepling snake" provides a sinister contrast to the melodious assonance of "light invades dilate lens" and the image of a snake entering a camera's eye to stamp its "flaming image in birthspot/with characters no cockcrow can deface" carries a powerful sexual connotation, (Plath CP)

Other lines in the poem suffer from a rhetorical density or a forced sense of diction. The closing couplet "O maker of proud planet's negative,/obscure the scalding sun till no clocks move" rings strangely archaic and forced in a poem where other more startlingly original lines and images flourish in abundance. The image of the "steepling snake" is also notable for its ironic "pun" on the image of a church-steeple: a foreshadowing of a fully-fledged anti-church sentiment which Plath later used in poems like Medusa, Lady Lazarus, and Medallion. "Sonnet to Satan" is representative of Plath's early tendencies to "corrupt" an otherwise startling poem with forced diction and odd-sounding rhetoric which is not at all in harmony with the otherwise precise and meter and figurative language, (Plath CP).

A more successful poem from the early period, one which was included in Plath's collection The Colossus, is "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." This poem like "Sonnet to Satan" utilizes an emblematic power -- in this case, the image of a black rook on a stormy day -- to convey sense of personal emotion and subjective response to nature. As is the case in many of Plath's successful poems, these subjective feelings are elevated through the poem's imagery, meter and diction to a universal sense of expression rather than a merely personal confession. The same pattern: mathematical precision, daring figurative language, and dense, often "artificial" rhetoric, which results in a unique, mythically charged idiom.

"Black Rook in Rainy Weather" demonstrates the same inconsistencies with diction that characterize most of Plath's early-period works. Beautifully phrased passages such as: "although, I admit, I desire,/ Occasionally, some backtalk/ From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:A certain minor light may still/ Lean incandescent/Out of kitchen table or chair" give way immediately to less natural sounding phrases: "Thus hallowing an interval/Otherwise inconsequent/By bestowing largesse, honor," and this obscurity in phrasing does diminish, if slightly, the overall impact of the poem.

As plath matured, her work became less rhetorical and more deeply personal. The mythic images of Satan and of Black Rooks were coupled with memories of her dead father, and with Plath's own explorations of Freudian psychology, both as an in-house mental patient (during her collegiate post-suicide months) who received shock-therapy, and as an out patient who sought therapy sessions periodically throughout her adult life.

One of Plath's earliest explorations of her "father-sea-god-muse" subject is a poem entitled "Full Fathom Five." This poem, composed in 1958, bridges the poetic "gap" between Plath's early work like "Sonnet to Satan" and her late, most highly distinguished work in Ariel.

Starting with a direct address to her dead father, a pattern that Plath would later repeat successfully in her most famous poem "Daddy," the poem "Full Fathom Five" represents the image of the dead father as rising from the sea: "you come in with the tide's coming/When seas wash cold, foam-/Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,/A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves/Crest and trough." to issue a sort of reverse-siren song to his still living daughter, the poetic speaker. When at last the speaker of the poem sees the father's god-like image rise, then dissipate on the open sea, she concludes: "You defy godhood./I walk dry on your kingdom's border/ Exiled to no good./Your shelled bed I remember./Father, this thick air is murderous./I would breathe water." (Plath, CP)

A companion poem written on the same day, Lorelei" expresses a similar death-sea wish. This poem, unlike "Full Fathom Five" carries a political punch, if a rather oblique one. In "Lorelei" Plath imagines that the mythic singers of the deep are calling to her from the world of "the nadir" where they rise "their limbs ponderous/With richness, hair heavier/Than sculptured marble" to sing "Of a world more full and clear/Than can be." The political connotation of them is achieved as the speaker of the poem identifies with the Lorelei as "sisters." This imagined sisterhood calls the poet from the everyday world of "a well-steered country,/Under a balanced ruler." to a world "deranged by harmony" the world of poetic insight and illumination, which culminates, as does "Full Fathom Five" in a death-wish "Stone, stone ferry me down there" (Plath, CP).

During the middle period of Plath's work, her reliance on oblique rhetoric and direct mythical allusion lessened and became replaced by a more lyrically dynamic, almost colloquial voice which rendered the deepest personal aspects of her experience to an articulation meant at achieving universality. The middle period poems are more successful than the early poems and juvenilia at gaining this universality, but the peak of Plath's technique was not yet attained and would not be attained until she wrote the poems of her final collection, Ariel.

The emotional turbulence of Plath's life forms a thematic undercurrent to all of her poetry. By welding intimate biographical details of her life to mythic symbols, themes, and settings in poetry, Plath at once elevated the personal aspect of lyric poetry nad familiarized or concretized abstract and mythical components of the human imagination . At the peak of her poetic power, during the composition of the Ariel poems, Plath's simultaneously personal and universal idiom soared to unprecedented heights, capturing the awed respect of both her former mentor, the poet Robert Lowell and poetic rival, Anne Sexton, along with legions of other poets, scholars, and lovers of poetry.

Plath’s most famous poem "Daddy" enjoys myriad biographical interpretations, an understanding of which are as necessary as understanding the poem’s other dimensions: prosody, rhyme, image, and theme for a thorough reading of the poem. Beginning with the most obvious parallel as well as the poem’s central theme of a "girl with an Electra complex," Plath’s journals reveal that she, indeed, suffered personally from an "Electra complex." While undergoing treatment with her psychologist Dr. Ruth Beuscher, Plath experienced a cathartic emotional climax during psychotherapy and recorded her subsequent thoughts. Plath also noted that her father was an "ogre" and "tyrant" and that he kept a hidden Nazi flag in his closet which he occasionally paraded in front of while dressed in Nazi regalia. "He wouldn’t go to a doctor, wouldn’t believe in God and heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home." Of her mother Plath observed, "She suffered{...} bound to the track naked and the train called Life coming with a frown and a choo-choo around the bend." (Plath Journal, 430)

This latter turn of phrase (with its train imagery) informs the imagery of Daddy when Plath writes: "An engine, an engine/ Chuffing me off like a Jew." Likewise, the Nazi imagery of "Daddy" conveys a sense of bleakest hopelessness, with Plath directly identifying her own childhood pain and loss of her father with the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis. "I have always been scared of you/ With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo./And your neat mustache/And your Arayan eye, bright blue."

Although the poem expresses the dramatic revelation of an "Electra complex," the poem’s opening lines foreshadow a strange inversion of powers; the admonition "You do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe" portends or infers that the speaker has won a victory over her oppressor (s); taken at their full impact, the opening lines convey not only a release from the familial neurosis implied by the aforementioned biographical details, but a sinister hint at the poem’s ultimately suicidal themes.

The line "in which I have lived like a foot/For thirty years, poor and white" mean to strike to the heart of the poet’s entire life and not merely the "Electra complex" that is so obviously rendered. The "shoe" is all form of oppression and constriction, though throughout the poem there is a strong sense of male domination and patriarchal oppression. "Of the poems that concentrate on the family, those dealing with the father provide the clearest and most powerful example of Plath's divided conception of the universe." (Rosenblatt 119)

That said, the poem gains its most sinister and perhaps most powerful energies from deeply autobiographical confession. Lines such as "In the waters off beautiful Nauset./I used to pray to recover you." can only be interpreted as personal motifs, since Plath summered in Nauset with her family and often referred to this time period as the most gloriously happy in her life. Memory, in the poem, is like the child remembers: "Daddy" brilliantly enlarges the memory of Plath's father to legendary proportions. "Plath dramatizes the situation between daughter and father as if no time had passed since the father's death: the emotional situation is still burning in her consciousness." (Rosenblatt 160) This constant tension between the ideal and the real – the remembered and the present – the child and the grown woman mirror the universal experiences of most people whether the specific biographical details are similar. In order to firmly establish the mythical impact of her private "theater" Plath employs heroic exaggeration via the imagery of the poem.

Similarly, Plath demonstrates that her personal life, as a focused theme for her thoroughly crafted poetry, attains a mythical stature in the process. This mythical resonance is prevalent in her poem "Medusa," which, while not as generally well-known as "Daddy" is actually a complimentary piece to the more famous work, with Medusa providing the maternal aspect of the two parentally themed pieces: ""Medusa" corresponds in Plath's work to "Daddy": both represent the search for freedom from parental figures" (Rosenblatt 127).

If "Daddy" drew upon events from Plath’s life and juxtaposed them with sweeping images drawn from world history, "Medusa" presents a more directly mythological connotation. From the title, alone, the reader is set to expect a resonance with Greek myth. However, what ensues is an inversion of the technique employed in "Daddy," which utilized a mathematically precise rhyme scheme and colloquial diction to elevate the personal to the status of myth. In "Medusa," a well-known myth is used as a kind of "anchor" by which the personal can be magnified and universally comprehended. Plath imagines her mother as the Medusa, capable of turning all who look at her into stone. ""Medusa" paints the portrait of a similar figure: she observes the speaker from across the Atlantic; she has a hideous head that can apparently turn the self to stone; and she wishes to hurt the speaker" (Rosenblatt 127).

One of the most interesting images in the poem is that of the Atlantic cable viewed by the poet as a "barnacled umbilicus" which keeps her tied to the "stone" world of Medusa with its "God-ball,/Lens of mercies" and Medusa’s "stooges" following the poet "Dragging their Jesus hair." This image also allows the infusion of biographical details, as in "Daddy" and in nearly all of the "Ariel" poems, as functional a part of the aesthetic as meter, rhyme, and diction. "The reference in the poem to the umbilical attachment between the poet and Medusa identifies this figure as the mother. Plath also alludes to a visit that her mother made to England in the summer of 1962 in the line: "You steamed to me over the sea."[...]"Medusa" attempts to cast off the parental image and to attain personal independence" (Rosenblatt 127).

The diction of "Medusa" is deliberately colloquial, conversational and punctuated by complex, corresponding imagery and figurative language. This alloy of disparate impulses, one toward the informality of a phone call or table-conversation, the other for the deep mythological reference and probing psychological confession, produces a brilliant and enduring poetic tension in Plath’s "Ariel" poems.

Though Plath's compositional method emerged from a deeply personal wrestling with her creative gift and ambitions, an interview with Peter Orr, conducted in 1962 revelas a few insights into Plath's poetic philosophies. She mentions that writing for her is a deeply organic act: "I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me" and one which had persisted with her from an early age, "I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I've been a bit of a professional" (Orr).

Her interest in verse -- modern verse specifically - was that of a podium for self-revelation and she longed for a "breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo". This interest in "taboo" subjects extended to all areas of human experience: "I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind" (Orr).

Plath also pointed out in the interview that is essential for aspiring poets to keep in touch with the world of things. She specifically cited her friends and associates as not being poets, primarily "And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ" and reiterated that it was essential for any poet to remain steeped in the things of the world and not merely emotions (Orr). Plath eschewed writing formally about her compositional methods or her philosophies of poetry. There are no essays which divulge her poetic insights; however, one journal entry from December of 1959, serves as an ample manifesto of artistic philosophy:

Writing is a religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the world. People read it: react to it as a person, as a philosophy, a religion, a flower; they like it, or do not. It helps them, or it does not.(Plath Journal 436)

The interview with Orr and the journal entry clearly indicate the poetry was first and foremost a mode of self-expression for Plath; and a confessional mode, when at its best. This philosophy found direct translation in the Ariel poems. Perhaps more than nay other single poem in the "Ariel" sequence, "Lady Lazarus" -- my personal favorite of Plath's poems --pushes the parameters of the poetic idiom described above. The subject of Lady Lazarus, like the subject of "Daddy" and "Medusa" is simultaneously autobiographical and mythological. In this poem, Plath conjoins her first suicide attempt with the Biblical story of Lazarus. And again, Plath produces a tension in diction by contrasting formal and colloquial language.

Against the predominantly colloquial diction, complex Latinate terms and phrases are contrasted providing the voice of the "establishment," of the "enemy" and the numb, indifferent, objective world. " The Latinate terms ("annihilate," "filaments," "opus," "valuable") are introduced as sudden contrasts to the essentially simple language of the speaker" (Rosenblatt 40). The prosody of "Lady Lazarus," with its sporadic, nursery-rhyme like rhymes: "I do it exceptionally well/ I do it so it feels like hell" "A wedding ring,/ A gold filling" ventures near the territory of light-verse, but the poem’s themes and images are anything but light. The strain of the prosody and diction against the profound themes of suicide, Nazism, psychiatric and medical tyranny, and social-alienation is produced without poetic collapse due to Plath’s unerring control of language:

"Lady Lazarus" closes, like "Daddy" and "Medusa" with the affirmation of the speaker’s vengeful triumph over adversaries. This closing "sting" in many of the most successful of the "Ariel" poems suggests a rebirth for the fragmented self described in "Lady Lazarus." The successful rebirth also indicates another, if secondary impulse, in the "Ariel" poems, that of communal identification or empathy. It is as though poet, having undergone the vivisection of "Daddy" "Medusa" "Lady Lazarus" and other poems, can now empathize with others who have been similarly wounded. Such a welding of personal and universal grief comprises the core emotional impact of Plath's most distinguished poems and underscores both their cultural and aesthetic power, which remains quite potent a half-century beyond the poets' tragic death.