S. Plath online essays and papers
di Pamela J. Annas

Intervista a Sylvia Plath

A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr

ORR: Sylvia, what started you writing poetry?

PLATH: I don’t know what started me, I just wrote it from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. 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: What sort of thing did you write about when you began?

PLATH: Nature, I think: birds, bees, spring, fall, all those subjects which are absolute gifts to the person who doesn’t have any interior experience to write about. I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

ORR: Now, jumping the years, can you say, are there any themes which particularly attract you as a poet, things that you feel you would like to write about?

PLATH: Perhaps this is an American thing: I’ve been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell’s poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Ann Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman4ike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting.

ORR: Now you, as a poet, and as a person who straddles the Atlantic, if I can put it that way, being an American yourself…

PLATH: That’s a rather awkward position, but I’ll accept it!

ORR: … on which side does your weight fall, if I can pursue the metaphor?

PLATH: Well, I think that as far as language goes I’m an American, I’m afraid, my accent is American, my way of talk is an American way of talk, I’m an old-fashioned American. That’s probably one of the reasons why I’m in England now and why I’ll always stay in England. I’m about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.

ORR: Does this mean that you think contemporary English poetry is behind the times compared with American?

PLATH: No, I think it is in a bit of a strait-jacket, if I may say so. There was an essay by Alvarez, the British critic: his arguments about the dangers of gentility in England are very pertinent, very true. I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

ORR: But don’t you think, too, that there is this business of English poets who are labouring under the whole weight of something which in block capitals is called ‘English Literature’?

PLATH: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I know when I was at Cambridge this appeared to me. Young women would come up to me and say ‘How do you dare to write, how do you dare to publish a poem, because of the criticism, the terrible criticism, that falls upon one if one does publish?’ And the criticism is not of the poem as poem. I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I first felt the full weight of English Literature on me at that point. I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I think that’ for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

ORR: You say, Sylvia, that you consider yourself an American, but when we listen to a poem like ‘Daddy’, which talks about Dachau and Auschwitz and Mein Kampf, I have the impression that this is the sort of poem that a real American could not have written, because it doesn’t mean so much, these names do not mean so much, on the other side of the Atlantic, do they?

PLATH: Well now, you are talking to me as a general American. In particular, my background is, may I say, German and Austrian. On one side I am a first generation American, on one side I’m second generation American, and so my concern with concentration camps and so on is uniquely intense. And then, again, I’m rather a political person as well, so I suppose that’s what part of it comes from.

ORR: And as a poet, do you have a great and keen sense of the historic?

PLATH:I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I’m very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn’t at all in my early twenties.

ORR: Do your poems tend now to come out of books rather than out of your own life?

PLATH: No, no : I would not say that at all. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. 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 mini I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

ORR: And so, behind the primitive, emotional reaction there must be an intellectual discipline.

PLATH: I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they don’t ossify.

ORR: What about writers who have influenced you, who have meant a lot to you?

PLATH: There were very few. I find it hard to trace them really. When I was at College I was stunned and astounded by the moderns, by Dylan Thomas, by Yeats, by Auden even: at one point I was absolutely wild for Auden and everything I wrote was desperately Audenesque. Now I again begin to go backwards, I begin to look to Blake, for example. And then, of course, it is presumptuous to say that one is influenced by someone like Shakespeare: one reads Shakespeare, and that is that.

ORR: Sylvia, one notices in reading your poems and listening to your poems that there are two qualities which emerge very quickly and clearly; one is their lucidity (and I think these two qualities have something to do one with the other), their lucidity and the impact they make on reading. Now, do you consciously design your poems to be both lucid and to be effective when they are read aloud?

PLATH: This is something I didn’t do in my earlier poems. For example, my first book, The Colossus, I can’t read any of the poems aloud now. I didn’t write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me. These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I’ve got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my own writing development is quite a new thing with me, and whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud.

ORR: Do you think this is an essential ingredient of a good poem, that it should be able to be read aloud effectively?

PLATH: Well, I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I’m very excited by it. In a sense, there’s a return, isn’t there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

ORR: Or to sing to a group?

PLATH: To sing to a group of people, exactly.

ORR: Setting aside poetry for a moment, are there other things you would like to write, or that you have written?

PLATH: Well, I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! I’m a woman, I like my little Lares and Penates, I like trivia, and I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life, and so I’ve become very interested in novel writing as a result.

ORR: This is almost a Dr. Johnson sort of view, isn’t it? What was it he said, ‘There are some things that are fit for inclusion in poetry and others which are not’?

PLATH: Well, of course, as a poet I would say pouf! I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can’t put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can’t!

ORR: Do you find yourself much in the company of other writers, of poets?

PLATH: I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers. I think writers and artists are the most narcissistic people. I mustn’t say this, I like many of them, in fact a great many of my friends happen to be writers and artists. But I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can’t understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. 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. I’m fascinated by this mastery of the practical. As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

ORR: Is there anything else you would rather have done than writing poetry? Because this is something, obviously, which takes up a great deal of one’s private life, if one’s going to succeed at it. Do you ever have any lingering regrets that you didn’t do something else?

PLATH: I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose. My best friends when I was young were always doctors. I used to dress up in a white gauze helmet and go round and see babies born and cadavers cut open. This fascinated me, but I could never bring myself to disciplining myself to the point where I could learn all the details that one has to learn to be a good doctor. This is the sort of opposition: somebody who deals directly with human experiences, is able to cure, to mend, to help, this sort of thing. I suppose if I have any nostalgias it’s this, but I console myself because I know so many doctors. And I may say, perhaps, I’m happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

ORR: But basically this thing, the writing of poetry, is something which has been a great satisfaction to you in your life, is it?

PLATH: Oh, satisfaction! I don’t think I could live without it. It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I’m writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn’t the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

from The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery. London: Routledge (1966). Online Source

***

‘Poem for a Birthday’ to ‘Three Women’: Development in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Critic: Eileen Aird
Source: Critical Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1979, pp. 63-72. Reproduced by permission
Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas, Mrs. Ted Hughes
‘Poem for a Birthday’ to ‘Three Women’: Development in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,

[(essay date 1979) In the following essay, Aird examines Plath’s rapid creative development after the publication of The Colossus. Challenging “the oversimplified and rather sentimental theory” that motherhood inspired Plath’s artistic growth during this period, Aird cites Plath’s remarkable commitment to her work and the influence of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Theodore Roethke.]

Critical discussion of Plath’s poetry is understandably focused on the magnificent late poems with occasional forays into the earlier exercises of The Colossus–and they were precisely exercises in style and image by a poet identifying her subjects. It therefore seems useful to pay some attention to the question of development, to the nature and timing of the transition from The Colossus to Ariel and to the poetic and biographical factors affecting this development. ‘Poem for a Birthday’ initiates the transitional period which ends with ‘Three Women.’ It is significant that these are her two longest poems, ‘Berck-Plage’ being the only other one which begins to approach their expansiveness of structure and imagery. The theme of pregnancy and birth in ‘Three Women’ is foreshadowed by the opening section of images of hibernation, storage and growth in ‘Poem for a Birthday,’ and in both poems realistic presentation merges into a symbolic opposition between creativity and destructiveness. The individual experience of the woman who conceives, carries and gives birth to a child is emblematic of a world of natural growth and patterned progression in stark contrast to the technological destructiveness of the world of ‘bulldozers, guillotines and white chambers of shrieks.’ Ted Hughes’s famous account of the development of Sylvia Plath’s poetry relates the two major accelerations of quality and command to the birth of her two children. This would date the transitional stage from mid-1960 to early 1962. The chronology of development revealed by the poems themselves does not entirely bear out his analysis. It indicates a longer period lasting from October 1959 up to June, 1962 and in the work of a poet who developed at the speed of Sylvia Plath months are significant. If we are looking for biographical factors, and I introduce them only to counterbalance the widely held acceptance of Hughes’s account–there is a much more precise correlation between the breakdown of their marriage and the writing of the great poems. In a letter to her mother written on 7 November 1962, immediately after moving into the London flat she said: ‘Living apart from Ted is wonderful–I am no longer in his shadow.’ The whole letter is over-elated and many of the subsequent heavily edited letters are much gloomier. Her own analysis however cannot be disregarded and it does go some way to suggest the much more complex relationship between circumstances and poetic processes that one would expect than the over-simplified and rather sentimental theory of childbirth as the stimulus.

‘Poem for a Birthday’ and ‘Three Women,’ then, mark off a period of rapid change and development in Sylvia Plath’s poetry, characterised not only by the movement from written exercises on the page, stylish, crystalline and static, to dramatic poems which need to be spoken aloud–a movement of which she was herself very conscious–but also by an increasing richness of imagery and a confident statement of subject.

The world of The Colossus is, for the most part, an external one of landscape and situation into which the personal is rarely allowed to erupt. The emphasis is too firmly on manipulation of both subject and form to make a contained statement, what we are given are neat, aesthetic glimpses of potentially dramatic situations. A case in point is a poem like ‘Point Shirley,’ an elegy for the poet’s dead grandmother heavily influenced by Robert Lowell’s early style. So self-consciously clever is the language that real grief and loss is ironically excluded from the poem. The simple domestic image at the beginning of the second verse, ‘She is dead / Whose laundry snapped and froze here,’ which does direct us very appropriately to an individual human reality, is immediately negated by the verbally vigorous but emotionless description of the sea. This is academic poetry of a high order but the emphasis is on structure rather than statement. In the last nine months of her life craftsmanship becomes the vehicle of expressiveness, there is a complete unity about the poems. Nevertheless there was still a feeling even in the mature work that some subjects were not suitable for poetry and this was one of the reasons she gave for turning to the novel: a form which she defined without apparent irony as appropriate for female concerns.

Poetry I feel is such a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! I’m a woman, I like my little Lares and Penates, and I like trivia, and I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such an intense life, but certainly more of life …
This is a revealing statement not just in terms of The Bell Jar but also of the late poetry which found a way of including those household details and using them as a stepping-off point for the wider concerns–’A Birthday Present’ begins with a woman making pastry, ‘Mary’s Song’ with a woman cooking the Sunday lamb, but in both poems the secure, protected world of kitchen and house very quickly gives way to an inner world of violent and tragic dimensions.
The poems of the last nine months of her life are marked by a complete unity of form and expressiveness and there are hints of this in a few exceptional poems in The Colossus, ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ in particular. Ted Hughes has commented very enigmatically on this poem as being ‘one of a group of poems that she wrote at this time about her father … This poem, one of her chilliest, recounts a key event in her Vita Nuova.’ Whatever the reason the poem has an urgent directness and sense of purpose which most of the early poems lack. It also has a very clear progression, a dominant feature of the later work which often rushes towards a conclusion which is also the climax of the poem. The complicated ambivalence of the relationship between father and daughter in the poem is established through the claustrophobic, wantonly erotic imagery of the opening verse:

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks

– but what is initially the abject subjection of the daughter, ‘My heart under your foot, sister to a stone’ argues itself into an acceptance of that subjection, even a transformation of it into exultant destiny: ‘The queen bee marries the winter of your year.’ The poem oscillates between the opposed images of the stone and the queen bee, an opposition which she was to return to frequently. The stone always represents a reduction to a core, stripped of all pretence and association, the low point from which a gradual ascent is eventually possible; its first important use is in the last section of ‘Poem for a Birthday,’ ‘The Stones,’ where the experience of the suicidal coma is such a reduction to a core, an elemental surviving self:

The mother of pestles diminished me.
I became a still pebble.

There are also significant references for this image in The Bell Jar, firstly in the skiing episode where Esther breaks her leg in a wild flight down a slope too difficult for her, which she sees as an attempt to recapture the protective safety of the womb: ‘the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother’s belly,’ and secondly at the end of the second section of the novel where having taken a large number of barbiturates–too many in fact, they make her sick–she lies down behind a stack of firewood in the basement expecting to die: ‘The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.’ In opposition to this static defence is the dynamic power of the queen bee. ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ needs to be read in conjunction with the late sequence of bee poems written in the autumn of 1962 where the queen bee is a symbol of female survival soaring triumphantly if murderously up:

Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her–
The mausoleum, the wax house.

This vision is in turn one of a series of female images of almost magical power and autonomy beginning with the circus performer of a very early poem ‘Circus in Three Rings,’ written while she was still at Smith, and finding later expression in the avenging Clytemnestra of ‘Purdah,’ ‘the pure acetylene virgin’ of ‘Fever 103°,’ the vampire killer of ‘Daddy,’ the ascendant phoenix of ‘Lady Lazarus’ and the majestic ‘God’s lioness’ of ‘Ariel.’ ‘The Beekeeper’s Daughter’ is a very significant turning-point from the undirected extravagance of ‘Circus in Three Rings’ towards the powerful female images of Ariel. It finds some similarities in ‘The Colossus’ and ‘Moonrise’ and perhaps most importantly in an uncollected poem of the same time, ‘Electra on Azalea Path,’ but like them is still held in the strait-jacket of formalities.

It is in ‘Poem for a Birthday,’ heavily reliant on Roethke’s structure and imagery though it is, that she first identifies both her subject and her voice. Roethke was such a fertile influence at this point in her development because she learnt from him that objective reality can serve as a medium to release the inner drama. ‘Poem for a Birthday’ acknowledges for the first time the supremacy of an inner world which earlier poems, ‘Lorelei,’ ‘Full Fathom Five,’ ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking,’ ‘Ouija,’ have only hinted at. The poems which Roethke collected in Praise to the End are the most direct influence on Sylvia Plath’s poem which has the same structure of short sections connected by theme and imagery. More importantly Plath’s subjects–madness, loneliness, sexual identity, family relationships, growth and searching–are very close to Roethke’s in poems such as ‘Dark House.’ Sylvia Plath acknowledges Roethke as a major influence in a letter to her mother on 2 February 1961: ‘Ted and I went to a little party the other night to meet the American poet I admire next to Robert Lowell–Ted [for Theodore Roethke]. I’ve always wanted to meet him as I find he is my influence.’ Her debt to Lowell and Sexton is acknowledged later in October 1962 and is a much more general recognition of an exciting mode, a developing convention. For all its raw immediacy, its deliberate assault on the reader’s sensibility, Ariel has a dramatic focus and personae which are pared away by Lowell and Sexton. This becomes very clear if we compare Lowell’s own comment on the intention of Life Studies with Sylvia Plath’s note on ‘Daddy.’ Lowell told an interviewer: ‘there was always that standard of truth which you wouldn’t ordinarily have in poetry–the reader was to believe that he was getting the real Robert Lowell!’ whereas Sylvia Plath wrote of ‘Daddy’: ‘The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part-Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyse each other–she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free of it.’ Sylvia Plath’s comment is not an evasion of the confessional aspect of the poem but an indication of the extent to which the personal is subordinated to a much more inclusive dramatic structure. Unlike Lowell Sylvia Plath was not writing a poetic autobiography but used personal experience as a way into the poem–this is further reflected in the reading response to Sylvia Plath which frequently begins at the level of autobiographical fact and then deepens into an awareness of the intellectual and tonal complexities of the poem. The real Sylvia Plath is far from present in the poetry and there is clear evidence of this in the comparison of the diary extract in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams in which she describes the meeting of bee-hive owners, on which the poem ‘The Bee Meeting’ is based, with the poem itself. Although the poem uses exactly the observed details of the diary–and Ted Hughes has explained that Sylvia Plath found it a useful discipline to describe people and places minutely in her diary–the whole mood and reference of the poem is transformed, the situation is changed from the humorous precision of the diary to a metaphor of alienation. Although her later work diverges from Roethkean structure and imagery he was seminal in showing her how to balance the personal and the general so that the poem is public rather than bafflingly private.

The purely literary influence of Roethke initiates the development towards poetic maturity but the biographical factors are also important. The whole of Sylvia Plath’s life up to 1959 was one of academic distinction and ambition, she won prizes, gained A grades, conquered one goal after another, but after the year’s successful but demanding teaching at Smith, with two degrees behind her and thoughts of graduate work to the fore of her mind she relinquished academic life in favour of full-time writing. The decision was obviously made under Ted Hughes’s influence–he had given up the academic world much earlier–and it was an immensely courageous step for her to take, involving as it did the rejection of one of her most deep-seated values–any one reading her Letters Home of the mid-fifties cannot help but be impressed by her sheer tenacity and desire for success. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had decided that they would settle permanently in Europe, so she was also turning her back on her family and cultural heritage as well as on the obvious career towards which all her efforts were previously directed. At this point in the autumn of 1959, she was pregnant for the first time and ‘The Manor Garden’ which like ‘Poem for a Birthday’ was written at Yaddo indicates some of the ambivalence of fear and excitement which this generated in her; its final, very satisfying image is a brilliant rendering of this ambivalence:

The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning

The period at Yaddo with its time for concentration and writing is a further factor: to be invited to Yaddo represented society’s recognition of artistic merit and for Sylvia Plath such recognition always seems to have been more important than it is to Ted Hughes. Writing to her mother on 16 October 1962 she described her Ariel poems with tragic irony as: ‘the best poems of my life: they will make my name.’ The notion of success was one which she could not relinquish easily as a scholar, a mother, a wife or a poet.

‘Poem for a Birthday’ was completed during the time at Yaddo and the title is richly significant reminding us as it does of her own October birthday, the coming birth of her child and the metaphorical deaths and births which modulate into the final qualified recovery of ‘The Stones.’ For the first time in this poem she directly faced the task of relating individual to general experience. That individual experience is female, defined both biologically and experientially and the poem is a dialogue between the dislocated girl who is maenad and witch and ‘the mother of otherness.’ To be female in ‘Poem for a Birthday’ is to be protective and procreative: ‘The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in,’ ‘Here’s a cuddly mother’ but it is also to be demanding and possessive: ‘Mother of beetles only unclench your hand: / I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.’ This counterpoints the major theme of the poem which is the need to rationalise the disparity of childhood and adulthood. The tensions are resolved finally in a rebirth after suffering: ‘We grow. / It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.’

Sylvia Plath said of her artistic method: ‘I think that personal experience shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should be generally relevant to such things as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.’ The relevance of this to the late poetry is abundantly clear but the process begins with ‘Poem for a Birthday’ where private experience–breakdown and the reasons for it, clinical treatment, pregnancy–is extended through the images which accumulate layer upon layer until it becomes a metaphor for suffering throughout the natural and the human world. The attempt to communicate the ‘real Robert Lowell’ emerges in Life Studies as a painfully accurate analysis of one man’s dilemmas which gains universal significance through the depth and detail of its treatment. Sylvia Plath’s method is essentially different, rather than delineating the individual in a recognisable cultural context she uses the private to gain access to the universal by ruthlessly mythologising her own experience and in doing this moves a long way from autobiography–’Lady Lazarus’ is not Sylvia Plath but a mythical character of suffering and rebirth, ultimately a type of the tragic poet of Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli.’

If both the themes and the images of Sylvia Plath’s poem are closely influenced by Roethke’s the ending is markedly different. Typically Roethke’s poems end in a moment of revelation even if it quickly falls back into the old state of waiting: the end of the quest is an organic awareness of wholeness, of the full recovery of identity. Although the image of the vase reconstructed at the end of ‘Poem for a Birthday’ recalls Roethke the mood is far from elated or affirmative:
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.

My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be as good as new.

To be ‘as good as new’ is to have lost the tragic intensity which characterised the earlier sections of the poem and is very close to the ending of Lowell’s ‘Home after Three Months Away’: ‘Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small.’

The sense of reduction and nullity points forward to the fear of the static in Ariel, the constant search for the dynamic: ‘What I love is / the piston in motion– / My soul dies before it.’

‘Poem for a Birthday’ explores the metaphoric complexities of a series of balanced opposites–fertility/sterility, child/adult, day/night, death/life, animal/human, illness/recovery–and the poems in Crossing the Water continue this exploration. Sylvia Plath’s own analysis of some of the poems in this volume is penetrating: bewailing their lack of dynamic accuracy with the self-mocking irony she employs with such brilliance in Ariel, she indicates the gulf between poetry as craft, the period of The Colossus and poetry as necessity, the period of Ariel. The poems, she says, are like those pickled foetuses of The Bell Jar, specimens for learning not the real living being and yet:

It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love
O I cannot understand what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.

But to be ‘proper in shape and number and every part’ is no longer the keynote of authenticity, the period of villanelles, of elaborate rhyme schemes and regular stanzas is over but the absolute confidence and daring of Ariel has to be worked for and many of the poems in Crossing the Water elaborate a world which is no more than gothic. The title-poem for instance is little more than a playing with images of darkness and silence relieved by characteristically lyrical moments: ‘A little light is filtering from the water flowers,’ ‘Stars open among the lilies.’ To take her own criteria of judgement this poem is not relevant to Hiroshima or Dachau, it remains in a private fantasy world although it is visually and verbally attractive. A much more accomplished poem is ‘Insomniac’ but this still lacks the fusion of elements which distinguishes the great poetry; it is never more than descriptive of a hollow world, it fails to evoke it despite the deliberate metaphorical violence:

Night long, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.

What she did achieve for the first time in Crossing the Water, however, was the wry, mocking humour which in Ariel frequently allows her to maintain the balance between public and private by deflecting interest from ‘the needle or the knife.’ ‘In Plaster,’ which owes something to Sylvia Plath’s observations of a fellow-patient when she was recovering from her appendectomy, is wry, brilliant, humorous in its portrait of the relationship between cast and patient. The persona of the poem is mocking but by the end of the poem we see that there is a complex balance between command and dependence in the relationship and in the last verse that mockery merges into a defiance which is the flimsiest of disguises for the sense of helpless dependency which lies beneath it:

She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she’ll soon find out that doesn’t matter a bit.
I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she’ll perish with emptiness and begin to miss me.

In the end the mocker himself is mocked and his earlier contemptuously pragmatic acceptance of the cast gives way to an awareness of the superior consistency of his partner; the word-play in the last line indicating that an uneasier intellectual wit has replaced the confident laughter of the beginning–humour as a mode of experiencing has become wit as an attempt to control.

Many of the poems of Crossing the Water are precise forerunners in subject, tone and imagery of the achievements of Ariel and the obvious companion poem of ‘In Plaster’ is ‘The Applicant.’ Both are poems about marriage–’The Applicant’ more obviously so than ‘In Plaster’ which only suggests it through the final identification of the patient as male and the cast as female, but the tone of ‘The Applicant’ has a ferocious humour which makes ‘In Plaster’ seem almost whimsical by contrast. It is clear that Sylvia Plath’s description of ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ as ‘light verse’ is descriptive of a mode which contrives a highly sophisticated blend of the ironic and the violent. The tentative beginnings of this mode are present as early as ‘Poem for a Birthday’ in the constant perception of self in animal or doll-like images. There is a deliberate pretence at belittling the enormity of experience which makes it more accessible. When the poetry fails it is sometimes because the ironic perspective is missing. This is very rarely the case in Ariel or Winter Trees but it happens more frequently in Crossing the Water. In the poem ‘Life’ for instance there is too sharp a contrast between the amused affectionate description of an idealised even deliberately sentimentalised Victorian past and the rigours of the present:

This family
Of valentine-faces might please a collector:

They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without let-up, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper.
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.

Although the poetry of Ariel constantly presses forward into extremes, they are contrived not confessional extremes. The much discussed ending of ‘Lady Lazarus’ is perhaps the best illustration of this with its images of transcending suffering both personally and aesthetically. Out of the ashes of the concentration camps and the emotional ruins of the suicidal patient rises the mythical phoenix affirming her identity as both female and poet. As in ‘Fever 103°’ the very experience of pain is the means by which the persona grows to a new power: the first statement of this is in ‘Poem for a Birthday’: ‘We grow / It hurts at first. The red tongues will reach the truth.’ The skill of ‘Lady Lazarus’ is exhibited by the tone of this ending which is ironic but without bitterness–we are out of the human world either of the voyeuristic onlooker or the concentration camp doctors and rising into the half-delirious visionary Paradise to which the ‘pure acetylene virgin’ of ‘Fever 103°’ aspires. It is a Paradise of autonomy and recognised identity, an image of completeness and completeness is one of the central subjects of Ariel. Crossing the Water achieves the ironic perspective but it fails to organise the opposites of Plath’s vision into the drive towards perfection of Ariel.

A final demonstration of the distinction between the assurance and imagistic richness of the late poetry and the valuable experiments of the transitional period lies in a comparison of ‘Candles’ with ‘Nick and the Candlestick.’ Both poems start from the imaginative associations of a mother nursing her child by candlelight but whereas ‘Candles’ goes no further than a consideration of the passage of time which links the Edwardian grandparents with the new baby, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ encompasses the painful world of the creative imagination and the potential dangers of the man-made world but is able to move beyond both in the affirmation of the mother’s love for the child:

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

The last verse is an elliptical comment on the poem’s structure for the baby is realised with detail and humanity at the heart of a poem which deals in abstractions. ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ is a very densely structured poem where each image, almost each word of the first half finds its echo in the second half and the joy of the ending does not evade the pain of the first half–baby and mother have not escaped from the subterranean cave only hung it with soft roses and the mercuric atoms still drip into the terrible well. The structure of ‘Candles’ in comparison is merely linear. Sylvia Plath’s greatness lies not in the extremity of her subjects, although it is this extremity which may initially draw the reader into the poem, but in her handling of richly allusive images and this is the point of ‘Stillborn’ which recognises that formal structure must give way to the organic unity of associative imagery. The more one reads the poetry the less possible it is not to seek echoes in other poems. The poet who composed slowly and cerebrally with frequent recourse to the Thesaurus and dictionary and who delighted in the esoteric and archaic was involved in the intellectual discipline of analogy and alternative which paved the way for the apparently effortless flow of association and image. ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ is an extraordinary complex and intellectually difficult poem but that difficulty is not a high gloss imposed on the poem by a mind still confined by an academic tradition, it is the natural attribute of what Sylvia Plath called ‘that unicorn thing–a real poem.’
Source: Eileen Aird, “‘Poem for a Birthday’ to ‘Three Women’: Development in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, 1979, pp. 63-72. Reproduced by permission.

Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
© 1999 The Gale Group. All rights reserved.

***

tutte le poesie in lingua originale

http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl187/docs/plathpoem.html

video con Aurelia Plath (previa registrazione gratuita)

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/MAPS/poets/m_r/plath/plath.htm

da: The Sunday Telegraph

Elizabeth Sigmund was Sylvia Plath’s confidante and “earth mother”. She tells Marianne Macdonald about her involvement in the new film, her friendship with Gwyneth Paltrow, and the shocking events she witnessed before - and after - Plath’s suicide.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” Elizabeth Sigmund says. I am looking at a framed picture of her with Gwyneth Paltrow that hangs in her living-room - a bizarre touch of Hollywood glamour in this rented stone cottage in Cornwall.

What was this elderly, arthritic lady doing on the set of a new film about Sylvia Plath? A glance around the room yields more Plath memorabilia: a newspaper is folded to show an article about the American poet, whose marriage to Ted Hughes and suicide at the age of 30 has generated endless speculation. On the coffee table lies a dated-looking hardback of Plath’s novel The Bell Jar.

This, it turns out, is no ordinary copy: it is the one Ted Hughes gave to Elizabeth just a week after Plath killed herself by putting her head in a gas oven. Because Elizabeth, the person to whom she had dedicated the novel, was Plath’s best friend. She was her wise “earth mother”, the woman Plath fled to in rage and despair when she discovered that her handsome husband, the father of her two children, Nick and Frieda, was having an affair with another poet, Assia Wevill. “My milk has dried up,” she sobbed. “Ted lies to me all the time. He has become a little man.”
After Plath’s death, it was Elizabeth who moved into the couple’s marital home in North Tawton, Devon, at Hughes’s request. And it was Elizabeth to whom Wevill sent the gas bill for the period covering Plath’s suicide at her London maisonette. (She was your friend, was the chilling implication: you pay the bill).

Most people know the bones of the Plath-Hughes tale but few have as vivid memories of it as Elizabeth. “I felt as if Sylvia was my utterly brilliant younger sister,” she says affectionately, in her musical, old-fashioned voice. “She was a person of importance: you could feel it and see it when you were with her. You knew she was special.

“I think Gwyneth in the film is very like Sylvia. She’s got that inwardness, a privacy about her, that Sylvia had. But, of course, Daniel Craig couldn’t be Ted. There wasn’t anything in the script that allowed him to be the charismatic person that he was. Ted was very big, he was very dark, he had this big Yorkshire voice and this Heathcliff quality. I don’t think you’d have met many women who weren’t starry-eyed and gaping at him. Women thought he was the most devastatingly attractive man they had met.”

Sylvia Plath: Four decades after she died, controversy still rages.

It is obvious what Plath saw in Elizabeth. She has a sharp intelligence and honesty, and evidently loves life. She once ran a shelter for heroin addicts and has campaigned against the use of chemicals in agriculture. The film company Miramax employed her as a consultant during the making of Sylvia. (which has just opened), But, though she befriended Paltrow, she was disappointed by the film’s portrayal of Ted’s and Sylvia’s relationship. “It doesn’t show their happiness,” she says. “Their house, for instance, wasn’t some dreary cold comfort farm. Court Green was a lovely old place in the village, with a beautiful garden and orchard. And Sylvia was so alive.”

Four decades after she died, the Plath controversy still rages, its central preoccupation unchanged: was Plath sinned against, or sinning? Did her demands and jealousy drive Hughes away, or was she the victim of his wandering eye?

The two views seem irreconcilable. Frieda Hughes, who champions her father, refused to co-operate with the making of Sylvia or allow Plath’s poetry to be used.

On the eve of the film’s release, she attacked the way Hughes had been “vilified by feminists who want to blame him for the suicide of my mother, and so adopt my mother for their own devices”. She drew a parallel between his hounding and the accusations levelled at Prince Charles over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Elizabeth’s disapproval is clear but she chooses her words carefully. “I think Frieda’s got a very hard path to travel,” she says. “But the Charles thing is nonsense.”

Elizabeth first met Plath and Hughes in 1962 after hearing them lament on the radio that they had no room to work at their tiny London flat. Her offer of accommodation was turned down - instead the couple bought Court Green, half an hour from Elizabeth’s house - but they became friends. Elizabeth talks of Plath’s radiance in the early days in Devon. She would enthuse about the children she and Hughes were going to have. So why was he unfaithful? Elizabeth sighs. “I think he was flattered because Assia was stunningly beautiful. He probably hoped he could have a quick fling and Sylvia would never find out. And, of course, he was insecure.”

Plath wanted to get back with Hughes after their separation, Elizabeth says. In the film he tells her they can’t because the 35-year-old Assia is pregnant, though Elizabeth is not sure if Plath, in fact, knew about that.

“And if anyone told her,” she says, “it would have been Assia, knowing what she was like. I’ve never come across anyone like her. She had no moral sense at all. She was like a very beautiful wild animal.”

Within a week of Plath’s suicide, Hughes and Assia had moved into Plath’s flat in Primrose Hill and were even eating in the kitchen where she had gassed herself. Why did they do that? Elizabeth shakes her head. “I thought it was dreadful. I couldn’t understand. I could see Ted didn’t have the strength any more to fight Assia - I don’t think he knew what he was doing. He had to look after the children, and all their stuff was there. And I think once Sylvia died, Assia decided she was going to become Sylvia.”

A week later, though? She nods. “It was terrible. I went there to see the children. A very nice girl was looking after them. She said, ‘You know Mrs Wevill’s living here?’ I said, ‘In this flat?’ She said, ‘Yes, and she’s having an operation - one of those.’ I said, ‘You mean an abortion?’ She said, ‘Yes, Mr Hughes has taken her to hospital.’ They came back and Assia went up to Sylvia’s bed. Ted came in and handed me a copy of The Bell Jar, because it was dedicated to me and my husband. He boiled a kettle for a hot-water bottle for Assia, stood back against the window and said, ‘It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius.’ I said, ‘But you haven’t.’ He said, ‘Just as well,’ meaning, ‘I might just as well have.’ “

Shortly afterwards, Elizabeth and her husband moved into Court Green to take care of the house for Hughes. He rang one day and asked if he could collect some things. “When he arrived, of course, Assia was with him. She didn’t want Ted to come and be there on his own. She said, ‘Ted, will you ask her to show me round?’ Ted looked down at his plate and said, ‘Would you mind, Liz?’“

Elizabeth stiffens with outrage and her voice rises. “I had to - it was his house. We went up the stairs and stopped outside Sylvia’s workroom, which was padlocked. She said, ‘Don’t you feel a traitor?’ Laughing, smiling. I said, ‘Yes, I do, and I’m not going any further.’ I went downstairs. Ted was in tears. Assia looked at him and looked at me and said, ‘Elizabeth, do you think Ted and I can be happy?’ I said, ‘Just look at him. Sylvia will always be there between you.’ “

What about the gas bill Assia sent her? Elizabeth shakes her head with horror. “We didn’t have a photocopier, otherwise I’d have photocopied it. But she really did do that. It was the North Thames Gas Board, and a little note at the bottom said, ‘I believe this covers your occupation of Court Green.’ I opened it and saw that this was the period when Sylvia had died!

“When Ted rang up, I told him. ‘Oh, stupid girl,’ he said, ’she does get in a muddle.’“

So it was a mistake? Elizabeth shakes her head grimly. “No, it was because Assia knew I was Sylvia’s friend, and I loved her. You see, this came after the scene where she’d asked me if she could be happy with Ted. She wanted to hurt me.”

She sniffs - even after four decades, talking about how Plath affects her. “Of course, Ted had demons,” she points out. “He was into black magic. He said to me at a party: ‘My creativity presented me with a demon. If I get close to people, I destroy them.’ I think he was tormented.”

Elizabeth’s prediction about the fate of Wevill’s relationship with Hughes came true. They never married and, in 1969, Wevill, too, gassed herself, taking her two-year-old daughter, Shura, with her. “She was getting fat and going grey by then,” Elizabeth says. “She complained that Ted’s friends couldn’t accept her because they felt she was the cause of Sylvia’s death.”

Does Elizabeth think the tragedy should be laid to rest? “The academic research will go on because Sylvia Plath was a very important poet. But I think it would be far better if the personal details of Ted’s and Sylvia’s life were let be, because what good can it do, bringing it up again?

Ted Hughes: colpevole o innocente?

Ted Hughes
Innocent Victim or Secret Murderer?

Ted Hughes, one of the most controversial and influential British poets of modern time, once “stated that poems, like animals, are each one ‘an assembly of living parts, moved by a single spirit’” (Liukkonen). Born to a warmhearted carpenter and a mother famous for making jams and gooseberry pies, Ted Hughes was born and raised in Yorkshire on the moors of England. He would often hunt for small game with his mother and was interested in the natural world (The Academy). After studying at Cambridge University, he met his wife-to-be, American poet, Sylvia Plath. In 1962, the couple decided to separate when Hughes fell for another woman, Assia Wevill, and in 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide by means of carbon monoxide poisoning. Wevill, Hughes’ mistress, was a German woman who had been involved in three previous marriages. Hughes never fully recovered from Plath’s death and his damaged reputation would follow him to his grave. Partly because of this, Wevill feared that Hughes was going to leave her. One tragic day in 1969, she gave their four-year-old daughter, Shura, some sleeping pills and turned the gas oven on. Then Wevill and Shura lay together on a mattress, both of them sadly dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. The fact that two of Hughes’ lovers both died self-implicated deaths by carbon monoxide poisoning is suspicious to some critics and because of this, Hughes is one of the most controversial poets of his time (Liukkonen).
The early life of Ted Hughes could be described as ordinary, almost benign. But many of these “unimportant” events in his early childhood resulted in some of the deepest poetry recently recorded. Born into a close family in Mytholmroyd, the West Riding district in Yorkshire, Hughes had two loving parents and two supportive siblings: one sister (Olwyn, who was two years older) and one brother (Gerald, who was ten years older). Hughes once stated in a letter that “’[Gerald] made my early life a kind of paradise’” (Skea), obviously showing evidence of a close, brotherly relationship between the two preadolescents. In fact, they would often go out together on the moors in search of small game animals; it was upon this dramatic terrain that Hughes became a keen spectator of the natural world.
Apparently these experiences left a huge impact on Hughes and his future as a poet. In an interview Hughes declared that “’my first six years shaped everything’” (Skea), indicative of the strong correlation between encounters in his upbringing and works that he would later author. When Hughes was six, his family joined a new neighborhood in Mexborough, where they owned their own newspaper and tobacco shop. It was here that Hughes attended his first school, Mexborough Grammar School, and created his first work at fifteen years old. He entitled his story “Zulus and the Wild West,” written in the style of Rudyard Kipling, one of his favorite childhood writers (Skea). He received Robert Graves’ The White Goddess as a prize for his work, and was so moved and influenced by the book that he personally sent Graves a letter of appreciation years later (Paul). Hughes said that “’ [the book] was the Chief Holy book of my poetic conscience’” (Paul) and therefore was another major influence on him brought upon at this early age. Hughes’ father, William Henry Hughes, fought during World War I in the Battle of Gallipoli. As one of only seven survivors from his regiment, he would share stories of the war and his involvement in it with his family, including his son Ted. This was one of the few isolated examples of a negative influence upon Hughes’ early life. After graduating from high school in 1948, Hughes spent the next two years fulfilling his duty to England by completing his two years of national service in the Royal Air force (Liukkonen).
While in the Air force, Hughes found himself spending time studying Shakespeare’s plays. He memorized much of Shakespeare and eventually grew to know much of it by heart. After his national service, Hughes received a scholarship to read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, where he spent much of his time reading Yeats and listening to Beethoven (Skea).
Then in 1953, he changed his concentration of studies from English to archaeology and anthropology. This switch in major was influenced by a dream about a fox that Hughes had one night. He would go on to write about this fox in later books such as Winter Pollen and Wolfwatching (Feinstein 24). Hughes graduated with respectable grades from Cambridge in 1954. His family asked him to come home, live with them, and possibly work in the family textile business, which his uncle Walt ran, but during all of his time away from home, Hughes had been writing poetry and he knew that was exactly what he wanted to do (Middlebrook 9-10). So in 1956, Hughes moved to London.
Hughes held numerous occupations in London, including rose gardener, zoo attendant, night watchman, and a school teacher (Skea). Hughes actually desired a respectable occupation in the industry of film or television, but his scruffy looks created a problem, as appearances are extremely important in the show business. Hughes’ friend Philip Hobsbaum held such a job in the television industry that Hughes desired, and Hughes one day went to meet him at the studio. Says Hobsbaum about Hughes, “’Ted in his hairy overcoat presented a contrast to the tinsel starlets and be-blazered leading men who populated the foyer.’” It was Hobsbaum who actually arranged for Hughes to work for the dramatist J. Arthur Rank, writing summaries of stories that were going to be submitted for potential development into films. On weekends, Hughes would commute back to Cambridge to publish his literary magazine, St. Botolph’s Review, to which he contributed a great number of poems and stories (Middlebrook 10-11).
This publication is what would ultimately lead Hughes to his future wife, Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath was an American who received a scholarship to attend Cambridge. Hughes and Plath met at a student party while Hughes was back at Cambridge for the weekend. Plath had been following Hughes through his poetry publications, and Hughes had heard talk about Plath from his friends, as females were out-numbered ten to one at Cambridge, and each of the males there would scrutinize the females (Middlebrook 11). Their first meeting at the party would foretell their future – Plath bit Hughes on the cheek so hard that it bled profusely and left a permanent scar (Liukkonen). Hughes was a great man, but when Plath came into his life, a parasitic relationship ensued: Plath’s presence undeservingly scarred both his face and his reputation.
The two young poets fell in love and were married in June 1956. Plath had a great passion for her husband’s work, and it was in fact Plath that encouraged Hughes to enter his first manuscript (The Hawk in the Rain) into the Poetry Center’s First Publication contest. He won the competition and his book was published the next year. The relationship between Hughes and his wife was a loving one. They were similar yet different at the same time, of the same mind and spirit, yet opposites. They had two children together, Frieda and Nicholas, and taught together at Amherst and Smith College. Trouble arose in the summer of 1962, however. Hughes fell in love with another woman, the German-born Assia Wevill. This event, according to most Hughes’ experts, prompted Plath’s suicide in 1963. She died of self-induced carbon monoxide poisoning. Hughes received the blame for Plath’s death, yet he still loved her. These factors contributed to his mistress Wevill’s suicide/murder in which she killed herself and their four-year-old daughter, Shura. They both also died of self-induced carbon monoxide poisoning (Academy). Hughes never quite recovered from Plath’s death, which set him searching for another woman. He had relationships with at least two more women. After his mother passed away in the 1970’s, Hughes married Carol Orchard (Paul). He also had a four-year love affair with Australian Jill Barber, who revealed their affair in 2001. Says Barber of Hughes, “’he looks like Heathcliff; he is rough, passionate, forceful’” (Azam). Hughes would go on to write many more famous works of prose, poetry, and children’s stories. He succumbed to cancer in 1998 when he passed away at his home in Devonshire, England (Academy)
Hughes’ works reflected his hard life put upon mostly by himself. Writing throughout all of his hardships, through his national service, through college, through meeting and losing the love of his life, and through all of the criticism he received for Plath’s death, Hughes’ work can be considered almost autobiographical in nature. The violent ambiance of some of his poems were, according to Hughes, influenced by the stories of his father in the war and his own experiences upon the moor, hunting small game with his brother (Academy). He was also an avid observer of the natural world, creating many poems featuring animals, the most famous being “Crow,” a set of story-poems in which the protagonist, a somewhat of a mixture of god, bird, and man, is “an embodiment of vitality that challenges all supremacy of ‘death’” (Liukkonen). His work “[uses] both lyric form and dramatic monologue to give voice to the intense struggle between the hunter and the hunted, the human and the divine” (Academy). Shamanism, hermeticism, and astrology also appeared to be influences upon Hughes and his writing. He talks about survival and the destructiveness of the universe in some of his “animal works.” Hughes’ writing ranges from free verse to complex forms and rhyme schemes. He said once “that there is no ideal form of poetry or writing” (Liukkonen), which is visualized by the various writing techniques and structure he experiments with. Many of his most famous works are biographies of animals, such as “Crow” and Wolfwatching, but much of his writing catalogs his and Plath’s lives. Ariel, Plath’s final collection, was edited completely by Hughes. Hughes destroyed and “misplaced” many key entries from the journals and re-ordered many of them, possibly trying to keep himself from looking bad by demolishing any evidence of his mistreatment of Plath. Hughes’ final collection, Birthday Letters, records every chapter of his relationship with Plath, including their meeting, marriage, separation, and her suicide. This work re-ignited the famous controversy over whether or not Hughes had anything to do with Plath’s suicide although it was published 35 years after her death (Academy).
While living, Hughes met widespread critical acclaim. His first publication, The Hawk in the Rain, was published 1957 as a result of his winning the Poetry Center’s contest. The book “established Hughes as an important and innovative poet of his generation” (Academy). His final collection, Birthday Letters, met only mixed critical review, but was an immediate best-seller. For some reason, the mysterious controversy between Hughes and Plat excited and intrigued many. The fact that we will never know all the details of the situation pulls people into the hullabaloo of the scandal (Academy). Hughes won many awards during and after his lifetime, including being appointed Poet Laureate (1984), receiving an honorary degree from Exeter University (1982), receiving an honorary DLitt from Cambridge University (1986), and receiving the Order of Merit (1998) (Paul). He actually received every major European award except for the Nobel Prize. Even though Hughes met such great critical acclaim during his life, he was also highly criticized by feminists, who claim that Hughes drew Plath and Wevill to their suicides. Many publications have been produced exemplifying Hughes as a murderer, trying to get Hughes convicted of some sort of crime. Hughes always blamed Plath’s death on herself, arguing that he had nothing to do with her suicide. It is interesting, however, that Plath committed suicide as a result of her separation with Hughes, which he encouraged while Wevill, his mistress, committed suicide because of his ex-wife’s death and the controversy surrounding that circumstance. It is almost a catch-22 situation in which both of the women involved with Hughes ultimately committed suicide as a result of each other, but the indirect connection between them was Ted Hughes.
It is hard to describe Hughes’ place in British literature today, as he passed away so recently, but much of his work has already inspired others. For example, one of his children’s stories, The Iron Man, is the basis of Pete Townsend’s concept album of the same name and the animated motion picture, The Iron Giant (Liukkonen). Hughes’ writing will live on as a testament to his ability to overcome the “worst case scenarios” many will never have to face. His dynamic life led him to compose some of the greatest everlasting writing of all time, offering a small glimpse into the psyche of this interesting man, the likes of which this world shall never see again.

written by K.A.C. and edited by A. Baylo

Works Cited

The Academy of American Poets. Ted Hughes. 1 March 2004. http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=114.
Azam, Nadeem. Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer. 1 March 2004. http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html.
Feinstein, Elaine. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.
Liukkonen, Petri. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) - byname of Edward J. Hughes. 1March 2004. http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/thughes.htm.
Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath - A Marriage. New York: Viking, 2003.
Paul, Sylvia. Ted Hughes: Centre for Ted Hughes Studies. 2 March 2004 http://www3.sympatico.ca/sylvia.paul/hughes_index.htm.
Skea, Ann, Ph.D. The Ted Hughes Homepage. http://www.zeta.org.au/%7Eannskea/THHome.htm.

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The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962

July 1950 - I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college. When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this I’d call myself a fool to ask for more …

2. Ilo asked me today in the strawberry field, “Do you like the Renaissance painters? Raphael and Michelangelo? I copied some of Michelangelo once. And what do you think of Picasso … These painters who make a circle and a little board going down for a leg?” We worked side by side in the rows, and he would be quiet for a while, then suddenly burst out with conversation, speaking with his thick German accent. He straightened up, his tan, intelligent face crinkling up with laughter. His chunky, muscular body was bronzed, and his blonde hair tucked up under a white handkerchief around his head. He said, “You like Frank Sinatra? So sendimental, so romandic, so moonlight night, Ja?”

3. A sudden slant of bluish light across the floor of a vacant room. And I knew it was not the streetlight, but the moon. What is more wonderful than to be a virgin, clean and sound and young, on such a night? … (being raped.)

4. Tonight was awful. It was the combination of everything. Of the play “Goodbye My Fancy,” of wanting, in a juvenile way, to be, like the heroine, a reporter in the trenches, to be loved by a man who admired me, who understood me as much as I understood myself. And then there was Jack, who tried so hard to be nice, who was hurt when I said all he wanted was to make out. There was the dinner at the country club, the affluence of money everywhere. And then there was the record … the one so good for dancing. I forgot that it was the one until Louie Armstrong began to sing in a voice husky with regret, “I’ve flown around the world in a plane, settled revolutions in Spain, the North pole I have charted … still I can’t get started with you.” Jack said: “Ever heard it before?” So I smiled, “Oh, yes.” It was Bob. That settled things for me - a crazy record, and it was our long talks, his listening and understanding. And I knew I loved him.

5. Tonight I saw Mary. Jack and I were pushing out of the theater in a current of people, and she was edging the other way in a dark blue jacket. I hardly recognized her with her eyes downcast, her face made up. But beautiful. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” I said. “Mary. Call me, write me.” She smiled, a little like the Mary I used to know, and she was gone. I knew I would never have a friend quite like her. So I went out in a white dress, a white coat, with a rich boy. And I hated myself for my hypocrasy. I love Mary. Betsy is nothing but fun; hysterical fun. Mary is me … what I would be if I had been born of Italian parents on Linden Street. She is something vital, an artist’s model, life. She can be rude, undependable, and she is more to me than all the pretty, well-to-do, artificial girls I could ever meet. Maybe it’s my ego. Maybe I crave someone who will never be my rival. But with her I can be honest. She could be a prostitute, and I would not give a damn; I’ll never deny her as a friend …

6. Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

7. I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time …

8. With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand … hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

9. Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to. I’ve just got to put down what happened to me this afternoon. I can’t tell mother; not yet, anyway. She was in my room when I came home, fussing with clothes, and she didn’t even sense that something had happened. She just kept scolding and chattering on and on. So I couldn’t stop her and tell her. No matter how it comes out, I have to write it.

It rained all afternoon at the farm, and I was cold and wet, my hair under a silk print kerchief, my red ski jacket over my sweatshirt. I had worked hard on beans all afternoon and picked over three bushels. Since it was five o’clock, people were leaving, and I was waiting beside the cars for my ride home. Kathy had just come up, and as she got on her bike she called, “Here comes Ilo.”

I looked, and sure enough, there he was, coming up the road in his old khaki shirt with his familiar white handkerchief tied around his head. I was on conversational terms with him since that day we worked together in the strawberry field. He had given me a pen and ink sketch of the farm, drawn with detail and assurance. Now he was working on a sketch of one of the boys.

So I called, “Have you finished John’s picture?”

“Oh, ya, ya,” he smiled. “Come and see. Your last chance.” He had promised to show it to me when he was done, so I ran out and got in step with him on his way to the barn. That’s where he lives.

On the way, we passed Mary Coffee. I felt her looking at me rather strangely. Somehow I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“Hullo, Mary,” Ilo said.

“Hello, Ilo,” Mary said in an oddly colorless voice.

We walked by Ginny, Sally, and a crowd of kids keeping dry in the tractor shed. A roar went up as we passed. A singsong, “Oh, Sylvia.” My cheeks burned.

“Why do they have to tease me?” I asked. Ilo just laughed. He was walking very fast.

“We’re going home in a little while,” Milton yelled from the washroom.

I nodded and kept walking, looking at the ground. Then we were at the barn, a huge place, a giant high ceilinged room smelling of horses and damp hay. It was dim inside; I thought I saw the figure of a person on the other side of the stalls, but I couldn’t be sure. Without saying a word, Ilo had begun to mount a narrow flight of wooden stairs.

“You live up there? All these stairs?”

He kept walking up, so I followed him, hesitating at the top.

“Come in, come in,” he said, opening a door. The picture was there, in his room. I walked over the threshold. It was a narrow place with two windows, a table full of drawing things, and a cot, covered with a dark blanket. Oranges and milk were set out on a table with a radio.

“Here,” he held out the picture. It was a fine pencil sketch of John’s head.

“Why, how do you do it? With the side of the pencil?”

It seemed of no significance then, but now I remember how Ilo had shut the door, had turned on the radio so that music came out.

He talked very fast, showing me a pencil. “See, here the lead comes out, any size.” I was very conscious of his nearness. His blue eyes were startlingly close, looking at me boldly, with flecks of laughter in them.

“I really have to go. They will be waiting. The picture was lovely.”

Smiling, he was between me and the door. A motion. His hand closed around my arm. And suddenly his mouth was on mine, hard, vehement, his tongue darting between my lips, his arms like iron around me.

“Ilo, Ilo!” I don’t know whether I screamed or whispered, struggling to break free, my hands striking wildly, futiley against his great strength. At last he let me go, and stood back. I held my hand against my mouth, warm and bruised from his kiss. He looked at me quizzically, with something like surprised amusement as he saw that I was crying, frightened. No one ever kissed me that way before, and I stood there, flooded with longing, electric, shivering.

“Why, why,” he made sympathetic, depreciating little noises. “I get you some water.”

He poured me out a glass, and I drank it. He opened the door, and I stumbled blindly downstairs, past Maybelle and Robert, the little colored children, who called my name in the corrupted way kids have of pronouncing things. Past Mary Lou, their mother, who stood there, a silent, dark presence.

And I was outdoors. A truck was going by. Coming from behind the barn. In it was Bernie - the horrible, short, muscular boy from the washroom. His eyes glittered with malicious delight, and he drove fast, so I could not catch up with him. Had he been in the barn? Had he seen Ilo shut the door, seen me come out? I think he must have.

I walked up past the washroom to the cars. Bernie yelled out, “Why are you crying?” I wasn’t crying. Kenny and Freddy came by on the tractor. A group of boys, going home, looked at me with a light flickering somewhere in their eyes. “Did he kiss you?” one asked, with a knowing smile.

I felt sick. I couldn’t have spoken if someone had talked to me. My voice was stuck in my throat, thick and furry.

Mr. Tompkins came up to the pump to watch Kenny and Freddy run the old stock car. They were nice, but they knew. They all must know.

“There’s cutie pie,” Kenny said.

“Cutie pie and angel face.” Freddy said.

So I stood there, arms folded, staring at the whirring engine, smiling as if I was all right, as if nothing had happened.

Milton sat in the rumble seat with me going home. David drove, and Andy was in front. They all looked at me with that dancing light in their eyes. David said in a stiff, strained voice, “Everybody in the washroom was watching you go into the barn and making wisecracks.”

Milton asked about the picture. We talked a little about art and drawing. They were all so nice. I think they may have been relieved at my narrow escape; they may have expected me to cry. They knew, though, they knew.

So I’m home. And tomorrow I have to face the whole damn farm. Good Lord, It might have happened in a dream. Now I can almost believe it did. But tomorrow my name will be on the tip of every tongue. I wish I could be smart, or flip, but I’m too scared. If only he hadn’t kissed me. I’ll have to lie and say he didn’t. But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many …?

10. This morning I had my two left wisdom teeth out. At 9 A.M. I walked into the dentist’s office. Quickly, with a heavy sense of impending doom, I sat in the chair after a rapid, furtive glance around the room for any obvious instruments of torture such as a pneumatic drill or a gas mask. No such thing. The doctor pinned the bib around my neck; I was just about prepared for him to stick an apple in my mouth and strew sprigs of parsley on my head. But no. All he did was ask, “Gas or novacaine?” (Gas or novacaine. Heh, heh! Would like to see what we have on stock, madam? Death by fire or water, by the bullet or the noose. Anything to please the customer.) “Gas,” I said firmly. The nurse sneaked up behind me, put a rubber oval over my nose, the tubes of it cutting pleasantly into my cheek. “Breathe easily.” The gas sifted in, strange and sickeningly sweet. I tried not to fight it. The dentist put something in my mouth, and the gas began to come in in big gulps. I had been staring at the light. It quivered, shook, broke into little pieces. The whole constellation of little iridescent fragments started to swing in a rhythmic arc, slow at first, then faster, faster. I didn’t have to try hard to breathe now; something was pumping at my lungs, giving forth an odd, breathy wheeze as I exhaled. I felt my mouth cracking up into a smile. So that’s how it was … so simple, and no one had told me. I had to write it, to describe how it was, before I went under. I fancied my right hand was the tip of the arc, curved up, but just as my hand got into position, the arc would swing the other way, gaining momentum. How clever of them, I thought. They kept the feeling all secret; they wouldn’t even let you write it down. And then I was on a pirate ship, the captain’s face peering at me from behind the wheel, as he swung it, steering. There were columns of black, and green leaves, and he was saying loudly, “All right, close down easily, easily.” Then the sunlight burst into the room through the venetian blinds; I breathed hard, filling my lungs with air. I could see my feet, my arms; there I was. I tried hard to get back in my body again … it was such a long way to my feet. I lifted my hands, to my head; they shook. It was all over … till next Saturday.

11. Emile. There it is; his name. And what can I say? I can say he called for me at nine Saturday night, that I was still weak from having two wisdom teeth out that morning. I can say that we went on a double date dancing at Ten Acres, that I drank five glasses, in the course of the evening, to the bottom, of sparkling tawny gingerale, while the others drank beer. But that’s not it. Not at all. This is how it was. I dressed slowly, smoothing, perfuming, powdering. I sat upstairs in the moist gray twilight, with the rain trickling down outside, while the family talked and laughed with company down on the porch. This is I, I thought, the American virgin, dressed to seduce. I know I’m in for an evening of sexual pleasure. We go on dates, we play around, and if we’re nice girls, we demure at a certain point. And so it goes. We walked into the bar and sat down, two by two. E. and I had the initial strangeness to rub off. We began to talk - about the funeral he went to this morning, about his twenty year old cousin who broke his back and is paralyzed for life, about his sister who died of pneumonia at twelve years. “Good lord, we’re morbid tonight,” he shuddered. And then, “You know something I’ve always liked … I mean wanted to like? Dark eyes and blonde hair.” So we talked about little things, how words lose their meaning when you repeat them over and over; how all people of the Negro race look alike until you get to know them individually; how we always liked the age we were at best. “I pity Warrie,” he said, nodding at the other boy. “He’s twenty-two, out of Amherst, and he has to work the rest of his life. When I figure … only two more years of college.”

“I know, I’ve always dreaded birthdays.”

“You don’t look as young as you are.”

“I don’t see,” I said, “how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you’re young you’re so self-reliant. You don’t even need much religion.”

“You’re not by any chance a Catholic?” He asked as if it were quite unlikely.

“No. You?”

“Yes.” He said it very low.

There was more small talk, more laughing, sidelong glances, more of the unspoken physical friction that makes each new conquest so delightful. In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in. There was something in Emile tonight, a touch of seriousness, a chemical magnetism, that met my mood the way two pieces of a child’s puzzle fit together. He has a fine face, dark hair, and eyes with enormous black pupils; a straight nose, a one-sided flashing grin, a clean-cut chin. He is neatly made, with small, sensitive hands. I knew it would be the way it was. On the dance floor he held me close to him, the hard line of his penis taut against my stomach, my breasts aching firm against his chest. And it was like warm wine flooding through me, a sleepy, electric drowsiness. He nuzzled his face in my hair; kissed my cheek. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’ve just come out of a swimming pool, hot and wet.” (God, I knew it would be like this.) He was looking at me intently, searchingly, and our eyes met. I went under twice; I was drowning; and he flicked his gaze away. On the way to Warrie’s at midnight, Emile kissed me in the car, his mouth wet and gentle on mine. At Warrie’s, more gingerale, more beer, and dancing with the dim light from the porch, Emile’s body warm and firm against mine, rocking back and forth to the soft, erotic music. (Dancing is the normal prelude to intercourse. All the dancing classes when we are too young to understand, and then this.) “You know,” Emile looked at me, “we ought to sit down.” I shook my head. “No?” he said. “How about some water, then. Feel all right?” (Feel all right. Oh, yes. Yes, thank you.) He steered me out to the kitchen, cool, smelling of linoleum, with the sound of the rain falling outside. I sat and sipped the water he brought me, while he stood looking down, his features strange in the half-light. I put the glass down. “That was quick,” he said. “Should I have taken longer?” I stood up and his face moved in, his arms about me. After a while I pushed him away. “The rain’s rather nice. It makes you feel good inside, elemental, just to listen.” I was backed against the sink; Emile was close, warm, his eyes glittering, his mouth sensuous and lovely. “You,” I said deliberately, “don’t give a damn about me except physically.” Any boy would deny that; any gallant boy; any gallant lier. But Emile shook me, his voice was urgent, “You know, you shouldn’t have said that. You know? You know? The truth always hurts.” (Even clich*s can come in handy.) He grinned, “Don’t be bitter; I’m not. Come away from the sink, and watch.” He stepped back, drawing me toward him, slapping my stomach away, he kissed me long and sweetly. At last he let go. “There,” he said with a quiet smile. “The truth doesn’t always hurt, does it?” And so we left. It was pouring rain. In the car he put his arm around me, his head against mine, and we watched the streetlights coming at us, blurred and fluid in the watery dark. As we ran up the walk in the rain, as he came in and had a drink of water, as he kissed me goodnight, I knew that something in me wanted him, for what I’m not sure: He drinks, he smokes, he’s Catholic, he runs around with one girl after another, and yet … I wanted him. “I don’t have to tell you it’s been nice,” I said at the door. “It’s been marvelous,” he smiled. “I’ll call you. Take care.” And he was gone. So the rain comes down hard outside my room, and like Eddie Cohen, I say, “… fifteen thousand years - of what? We’re still nothing but animals.” Somewhere, in his room, Emile lies, about to sleep, listening to the rain. God only knows what he’s thinking.

12. There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don’t quite reach it. I can feel it when I think of human beings, of the hints of evolution suggested by the removal of wisdom teeth, the narrowing of the jaw no longer needed to chew such roughage as it was accustomed to; the gradual disappearance of hair from the human body; the adjustment of the human eye to the fine print, the swift, colored motion of the twentieth century. The feeling comes, vague and nebulous, when I consider the prolonged adolesence of our species; the rites of birth, marriage and death; all the primitive, barbaric ceremonies streamlined to modern times. Almost, I think, the unreasoning, bestial purity was best. Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll know what life is.

13. Tonight I wanted to step outside for a few moments before going to bed; it was so snug and stale-aired in the house. I was in my pajamas, my freshly washed hair up on curlers. So I tried to open the front door. The lock snapped as I turned it; I tried the handle. The door wouldn’t open. Annoyed, I turned the handle the other way. No response. I twisted the lock; there were only four possible combinations of handle and lock positions, and still the door stuck, white, blank and enigmatic. I glanced up. Through the glass square, high in the door, I saw a block of sky, pierced by the sharp black points of the pines across the street. And there was the moon, almost full, luminous and yellow, behind the trees. I felt suddenly breathless, stifled. I was trapped, with the tantalizing little square of night above me, and the warm, feminine atmosphere of the house enveloping me in its thick, feathery smothering embrace.

14. This morning I am at low ebb. I did not sleep well last night, waking, tossing, and dreaming sordid, incoherent little dreams. I awoke, my head heavy, feeling as if I had just emerged from a swim in a pool of warm polluted water. My skin was greasy, my hair stiff, oily, and my hands as if I had touched something slimy and unclean. The thick August air does not help. I sit here lumpishly, an ache at the back of my neck. I feel that even if I washed myself all day in cold clear water, I could not rinse the sticky, untidy film away; nor could I rid my mouth of the furry unpleasant taste of unbrushed teeth.

15. Tonight, for a moment, all was at peace inside. I came out of the house-across-the-street a little before twelve, sick with unfulfilled longing, alone, self-reviling. And there, miraculously was the August night. It had just rained, and the air was thick with warm damp and fog. The moon, full, pregnant with light, showed strangely from behind the small frequent clouds, poised like a picture puzzle that had been broken, with light in back, outlining each piece. There seemed to be no wind, but the leaves of the trees stirred, restless, and the water fell from them in great drops on the pavement, with a sound like that of people walking down the street. There was the peculiar smell of mould, dead leaves, decay, in the air. The two lights over the front steps were haloed with a hazy nimbus of mist, and strange insects fluttered up against the screen, fragile, wing-thin and blinded, dazed, numbed by the brilliance. Lightning, heat lightning flicked off and on, as if some stage hand were toying with the light switch. Two crickets, deep in the cracks in the granite steps, sang a sweet, haunting-thin trill. And because it was my home, I loved them. The air flowed about me like thick molasses, and the shadows from the moon and street lamp split like schizophrenic blue phantoms, grotesque and faintly repetitious.

16. Upstairs, in the bright, white, sterile cubicle of the bathroom, smelling of warm flesh and toothpaste, I bent over the washbowl in unthinking ritual, washing the proscribed areas, worshipping the glittering chromium, the light that clattered back and forth, brittle, blinding, from the faucets. Hot and cold; cleanliness coming in smooth scented green bars; hairs in thin, penciled lines, curving on the white enamel; the colored prescriptions, the hard, glassed-in jars, the bottles that can cure the symptoms of a cold or send you to sleep within an hour. And then to bed, in the same potentially fertile air, scented of lavendar, lace curtains and the warm feline odor like musk, waiting to assimilate you - everywhere the pallid waiting. And you are the moving epitome of all this. Of you, by you, for you. God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?

17. A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin. I was sitting out on the steps today, uneasy with fear and discontent. Peter, (the little boy-across-the-street) with the pointed pale face, the grave blue eyes and the slow fragile smile came bringing his adorable sister Libby of the flaxen braids and the firm, lyrically-formed child-body. They stood shyly for a little, and then Peter picked a white petunia and put it in my hair. Thus began an enchanting game, where I sat very still, while Libby ran to and fro gathering petunias, and Peter stood by my side, arranging the blossoms. I closed my eyes to feel more keenly the lovely delicate-child-hands, gently tucking flower after flower into my curls. “And now a white one,” the lisp was soft and tender. Pink, crimson, scarlet, white … the faint pungent odor of the petunias was hushed and sweet. And all my hurts were smoothed away. Something about the frank, guileless blue eyes, the beautiful young bodies, the brief scent of the dying flowers smote me like the clean quick cut of a knife. And the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

18. Now I’ll never see him again, and maybe it’s a good thing. He walked out of my life last night for once and for all. I know with sickening certainty that it’s the end. There were just those two dates we had, and the time he came over with the boys, and tonight. Yet I liked him too much - way too much, and I ripped him out of my heart so it wouldn’t get to hurt me more than it did. Oh, he’s magnetic, he’s charming; you could fall into his eyes. Let’s face it: his sex appeal was unbearably strong. I wanted to know him - the thoughts, the ideas behind the handsome, confident, wise-cracking mask. “I’ve changed,” he told me. “You would have liked me three years ago. Now I’m a wiseguy.” We sat together for a few hours on the porch, talking, and staring at nothing. Then the friction increased, centered. His nearness was electric in itself. “Can’t you see,” he said. “I want to kiss you.” So he kissed me, hungrily, his eyes shut, his hand warm, curved burning into my stomach. “I wish I hated you,” I said. “Why did you come?” “Why? I wanted your company. Alby and Pete were going to the ball game, and I couldn’t see that. Warrie and Jerry were going drinking; couldn’t see that either.” It was past eleven; I walked to the door with him and stepped outside into the cool August night. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don’t want to like anybody too much.” Then it hit me and I just blurted, “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” He was definite, “Nobody knows me.” So that was it; the end. “Goodbye for good, then,” I said. He looked hard at me, a smile twisting his mouth, “You lucky kid; you don’t know how lucky you are.” I was crying quietly, my face contorted. “Stop it!” The words came like knife thrusts, and then gentleness, “In case I don’t see you, have a nice time at Smith.” “Have a hell of a nice life,” I said. And he walked off down the path with his jaunty, independent stride. And I stood there where he left me, tremulous with love and longing, weeping in the dark. That night it was hard to get to sleep.

19. Today the doorbell rang; it was little Peter. So I came out and sat on the front steps with him. I could sit by the hour listening to his prattling. He was jealous of Bob, asking in a small tight voice, “Who was that boy over your house? Who does he like best, Warren or you?” And then, “He called me pipsqueak. If you had a baby would you call him pipsqueak?” “I’m not tan,” he continued. “It’s dirt. I don’t like the looks of dirt, but I like the feel of it. Clean doesn’t feel good because you’re all wet.” He played with Warren. I went up to my room, and I heard a commotion outside. Peter had climbed to the level of the window in the little maple tree and was shaking the leaves down. -

20. From a letter to Ed - “Your letter came just now … The one about your walk in the city, about war. You don’t know quite what it did to me. My mental fear, which can be at times forced into the background, reared up and caught me in the pit of my stomach; it became a physical nausea which wouldn’t let me eat breakfast.

Let’s face it: I’m scared, scared and frozen. First, I guess, I’m afraid for myself … the old primitive urge for survival. It’s getting so I live every moment with terrible intensity. Last night, driving back from Boston, I lay back in the car and let the colored lights come at me, the music from the radio, the reflection of the guy driving. It all flowed over me with a screaming ache of pain … remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted. When you feel that this may be the good-bye, the last time, it hits you harder.

I’ve got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it’s too late. But writing poems and letters doesn’t seem to do much good. The big men are all deaf; they don’t want to hear the little squeaking as they walk across the street in cleated boots. Ed, I guess this all sounds a bit frantic. I guess I am. When you catch your mother, the childhood symbol of security and rightness, crying desolately in the kitchen; when you look at your tall, dreamy-eyed kid brother and think that all his potentialities in the line of science are going to be cut off before he gets a chance … it kind of gets you.

21. Here I sit in the deep cushioned armchair, the crickets rasping, buzzing, chirring outside. It’s the library, my favorite room, with the floor a medieval mosaic of flat square stones the color of old book-bindings … rust, copper, tawny orange, pepper-brown, maroon. And there are deep comfortable maroon leather chairs with the leather peeling off, revealing a marbled pattern of ridiculous pink. The books, all that you would fill your rainy days with, line the shelves; friendly, fingered volumes. So I sit here, smiling as I think in my fragmentary way: “Woman is but an engine of ecstasy, a mimic of the earth from the ends of her curled hair to her red-lacquered nails.” Then I think, remembering the family of beautiful children that lie asleep upstairs, “Isn’t it better to give in to the pleasant cycles of reproduction, the easy, comforting presence of a man around the house?” I remember Liz, her face white, delicate as an ash on the wind; her red lips staining the cigarette; her full breasts under the taut black jersey. She said to me, “But think how happy you can make a man someday.” Yes, I’m thinking, and so far it’s all right. But then I do a flipover and reach out in my mind to E., seeing a baseball game, maybe, perhaps watching television, or roaring with careless laughter at some dirty joke with the boys, beer cans lying about green and shiny gold, and ash trays. I spiral back to me, sitting here, swimming, drowning, sick with longing. I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disasterous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely, without misgiving, and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.

22.Yes, I was infatuated with you; I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn’t stand being a passing fancy. Before I give my body, I must give my thoughts, my mind, my dreams. And you weren’t having any of those.

23. There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.

Copyright © 2000 The Estate of Sylvia Plath. All rights reserved. Excerpted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

***

Stephen Moss assesses the critical response to the publication of The Journals of Sylvia Plath

The publication of The Journals of Sylvia Plath was, as Jacqueline Rose noted in the Observer, “heralded as an event of some literary significance”. Ms Rose, an authority on Plath, was given a good deal of space to expound on that significance, but didn’t quite manage it. Her conclusion - “No potential writer trying to haul themselves from bed, drudgery or distraction into writing should miss them” - made it sound more like a creative writing textbook than a new account of a life that has proved captivating and hugely controversial since Plath’s suicide in 1963.

Rose, in fact, was unwilling to read too much into Plath’s outpourings, and argued that publication of the journals (minus the two that Plath’s former husband, Ted Hughes, lost or destroyed) resolved nothing. “It is a mistake to see these journals as giving us access to some new or previously hidden ‘truth’ about Plath,” she said. “If the journals are cause for celebration [strange word, surely], it might be, bizarrely, because evidence can be found within them to support every single theory that has ever been produced about Sylvia Plath - the never recovered child of the dead father, the woman oppressed by the small, suffering psychic landscape of her mother, the woman trapped in a domestic life unredeemed by a feminism which arrived too late on the scene, the woman nursed by her husband out of pain into burgeoning creativity, the woman betrayed. They are all here. With each one so vividly and insistently present, and each one just as immediately countered by the energetic presence of another, it becomes clear that none of them, that is, none of them on their own, will, in fact, do.”
Other critics were more willing to base their readings of Plath’s life on her words, and two - John Carey in the Sunday Times and David Sexton in the London Evening Standard - thought the journals established once and for all that she was unbalanced, impossible, perhaps doomed. The corollary of their analysis was that Hughes did not deserve the opprobrium heaped on him for more than three decades by feminists who blamed him for Plath’s death.

“This is a portrait of the artist as a sick colossus,” wrote Carey. “Plath’s giant ego teetered on the flimsiest of stilts. Ambition goaded her. She craved the world’s applause, money and love. But behind the eager mask howled a vortex of self-doubt … Her elevation into a feminist icon seems curious, given the view of womanhood the journals express. Without a man, woman is incomplete. Single women have ‘wry sour lemon acid’ in their veins, and give off a ’sterile forced pathetic smell’. Only through childbirth can a woman achieve true fulfilment … Plath emerges from her account as an invalid. This is recognisably the same disturbed woman that we have met in Hughes’s Birthday Letters. In that respect his account is vindicated, if it needed to be.”

Sexton’s review trod strikingly similar territory: “Plath’s best poetry is tremendously accomplished but repulsive, indeed near to evil. Larkin put it best: ‘As poems, they are to the highest degree original and scarcely less effective. How valuable they are depends on how highly we rank the expression of experience with which we can in no sense identify, and from which we can only turn with shock and sorrow.’ She is a horror poet. This is all the more true of her journals. They are little less than the proof of psychosis. This new edition, 730 pages long, carefully transcribed from the originals, adds an enormous amount of material to the previous one, published only in the States, including two entirely new volumes, from the years 1957-1959, one of which contains raw and bloody material from her private therapy sessions. These expanded journals make Plath more than ever terrifying: self-obsessive, raging, living at an unendurable pitch of intensity. They go far to confirm Hughes’s helpless version of events … It is unfortunate that such pain and hatred, such deadliness, should have been thought a model for anyone, particularly for women, particularly for schoolchildren. The gradual absorption of these journals will at least make that mistake more difficult.”

The Carey-Sexton axis, the view that Plath was basically bonkers, had no gainsayers. Where were all the feminists who used to traduce Hughes? Has publication of Birthday Letters in 1998 put them all to flight?

Allison Pearson, in the Daily Telegraph, offered a more sympathetic view of Plath, but she too subscribed to the doomed poet view. “The journals are full of portents and prefigurings - at times so self-conscious they almost stiffen into plans. The book reads like the longest suicide note ever written. Death appears to have taken out a lease on Plath’s imagination at the age of eight, when her father Otto died, and never moved out.” Pearson examined Plath’s obsessive pursuit of a husband and her physical and psychological dependence on Hughes. “There is something almost unhinged in a phenomenally well read woman congratulating herself on having bagged the kind of Heathcliff rampant who straddles the pages of Mills & Boon,” she wrote. “But this is fifties America, and there is much to the modern eye that looks not just doolally but diseased in the relations between the sexes.”

So there we have it - society was to blame, not Hughes. How the picture has changed since the 70s. But is that really the end of the story?

On Sylvia Plath
Critic: Ted Hughes

Source: Raritan, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 1-10. Reproduced by permission
Criticism about: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), also known as: Victoria Lucas,

Mrs. Ted Hughes On Sylvia Plath,
[(essay date Fall 1994) In the following essay, Hughes comments on Plath’s struggle to transcribe her private anguish into the fiction of The Bell Jar. According to Hughes, Plath’s difficulty stemmed from her effort to produce a novel with both mythic aspirations and cathartic ritual based in reality.]

Sylvia Plath’s intense ambition to write a novel provides one of the main and most distressful themes of her early journals. Her inability to start–or worse, her various attempts to start–brought her repeatedly to near despair. She agonized about style, tone, structure, subject matter.

Throughout that same period, her poetry struggled into being against only slightly less resistance. Plenty of poems survive, perhaps because each of her convulsive efforts to break through the mysterious barriers by way of verse sufficed to complete a short poem–which could then be sold for cash and bore comparison with what other poets were publishing. But she knew these poems were not what she wanted. She valued them far more highly than her prose, because at least they reflected, often very beautifully, the obsessive inner life that made her write them. But though they reflected it, she felt they did not contain it, did not release it.
These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.
(”Stillborn”)

Her prose, however, seemed to her not even to reflect it.

As far as her difficulties with narrative prose went, in retrospect one can see a glaring mismatch between the great dreams of her novelistic ambition and the character of her actual gift. Her high-minded, academic passion for classic novelists combined with the priorities of her own sophisticated poetic talent made her think of the ideal narrative prose as something densely wrought, richly charged, of all-encompassing, superfine subtleties, with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James prominent in the pedigree. This is where most of her attempts to get her novel going foundered. They foundered because her vital inner creative life was not in them. Her heart, in other words, pulled her in the opposite direction–through Lawrence and Dostoyevski. On the evidence of The Bell Jar one could say, maybe, that her writer’s distress might have had less to do with her conscious failure to add another thoroughbred to that classic stable of stylists than to her unconscious horror at being dragged remorselessly towards what she did not want to face–even though her true gift was waiting there to show her how to face it.

Her breakthrough came–by the backdoor. Spring 1959, in a moment of seemingly no importance, like a gambler, playful and reckless, out of the blue she wrote her short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” This first-person narrative is composed in a voice that approximates the one she would find for The Bell Jar–a voice, that is, rather than a style. It whirls in a high-trapeze glitter of circus daring around one of her most serious terrors: her experience of the electroconvulsive shock treatment that jumped her out of the torpor in which her attempted suicide had left her.

Perhaps “Johnny Panic” was the divining work that located and opened the blocked spring. Change of home and travel prevented her from writing anything more till late fall. Then almost at once, with a place and a few brief weeks to concentrate, she made the first big breakthrough in her poetry. “Poem for a Birthday” returns to that stony source, but now lifts the shattered soul reborn from the “quarry of silences” where “men are mended,” and where her “mendings itch.” And the voice of Ariel can be heard clearing its throat.

Immediately after that, her writing was once again disrupted by physical upheavals: change of country, home-building, birth and infancy of her first child, all these interposed a full year, during which time that new voice, with the story it had to tell, stayed incommunicado. But in the spring of 1961 by good luck circumstances cooperated, giving her time and place to work uninterruptedly. Then at top speed and with very little revision from start to finish she wrote The Bell Jar.

In this narrative the voice has perfected itself. And what it has to tell is the author’s psychic autobiography, the creation-myth of the person that had emerged in the “Poem for a Birthday” and that would go on in full cry through Ariel.

The Bell Jar is the story, in other words, from behind the electroconvulsive shock treatment. It dramatizes the decisive event of her adult life, which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival, and reveals how this attempt to annihilate herself had grown from the decisive event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight. Taken separately, each episode of the plot is a close-to-documentary account of something that did happen in the author’s life. But the great and it might be said profoundly disturbing effect of this brisk assemblage is determined by two separate and contradictory elements. One of these operates on what could be called an upper level, the other on a lower.

The first, on the upper level, is the author’s clearly recognizable purpose in the way she manipulates her materials. Her long-nursed ambition to write an objective novel about “life” was swept aside by a more urgent need. Fully aware of what she was doing, she modeled the sequence of episodes, and the various characters, into a ritual scenario for the heroine’s symbolic death and rebirth. To her, this became the crucial aspect of the work. That mythic schema of violent initiation, in which the old self dies and the new self is born, or the false dies and the true is born, or the child dies and the adult is born, or the base animal dies and the spiritual self is born, which is fundamental to the major works of Lawrence and Dostoyevski, as well as to Christianity, can be said to have preoccupied her. Obviously, it preoccupied her in particular for very good reasons. She saw it as something other than one of imaginative literature’s more important ideas. As far as she was concerned, her escape from her past and her conquest of the future, or in more immediate, real terms her well-being from day to day and even her very survival, depended absolutely on just how effectively she could impose this reinterpretation on her own history, within her own mind, and how potently her homemade version of the rite could give sustaining shape and positive direction to her psychological life. Her novel had to work as both the ranking of the mythic event and the liturgy, so to speak, of her own salvation.

The very writing of The Bell Jar did seem to succeed in performing this higher function, for the author, with astounding immediacy and power. And the role of each episode and character, as they operate on this level in the book, has been a good deal discussed.

The main movement of the action is the shift of the heroine, the “I,” from artificial ego to authentic self–through a painful “death.” The artificial ego is identified with the presiding moral regime of the widowed mother. The inner falsity and inadequacy of this complex induces the suicidal crisis. With the attempted suicide it is successfully dislodged, scapegoated into the heroine’s double, Joan Gilling, and finally, at the end of the book, physically annihilated when Joan Gilling hangs herself. Simultaneously, the authentic self emerges into fierce rebellion against everything associated with the old ego. Her decisive act (the “positive” replay of her “negative” suicide) takes the form of a sanguinary defloration, carefully stage managed by the heroine, which liberates her authentic self into independence. On this plane, the novel is tightly related to the mythos visible in the plots and situations of the poems, which here and there share a good deal of its ritualized purpose. It can be read, in fact, as the logbook of their superficial mechanisms and meanings. To a degree, the novel is an image of the matrix in which the poems grew and from which they still draw life.

Without undergoing the psychic transformation of self-remaking, which she accomplished in writing this scenario, the author might not have come so swiftly and so fully, as she did, to the inspiration and release of Ariel. She might not have got there at all. As it is, a reader can chart her progress from the completion of the novel (late spring, 1961) to the first true Ariel poem (”Elm,” mid-April 1962). More physical disruptions–holidays, changing homes, etc.–help to account for the absence of the new voice in the four or five poems (”Insomniac,” “Widow,” “Stars over the Dordogne,” “The Rival,” “Wuthering Heights”) produced between late spring and mid-September. But in September she was able to settle once again to concentrated work, beginning with the ominous piece, “Blackberrying.” Three more strides (”Finisterre,” “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” “Last Words”) towards the land of the dead brought her to “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” where her father lies under the roots and her mother mourns in heaven:

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness–blackness
and silence.

Further exploration was disrupted by the birth of her second child in January 1962. But she was back on the path, in the depth of her vision, on the 4th of April, and found herself again in the same place, confronting the yew tree–which now consists of terrible music and opens to admit her. This is exactly as if she had entered her father’s coffin.

Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.
Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.
The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen
Lopping the sausages!
They color my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!
Great silence of another order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.
Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.
I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

(from “Little Fugue”)

The actual yew tree of the poem, as she saw it from the door of her house, stood in her sunset, on the opposite side, due West. Due East, filling her dawn sky as she saw it from the back of her house, stood the Elm.

The fascinating thing is what now unfolded between the 2nd and the 19th of April. As it happened, the 2nd fell in the dark phase of the Moon (which emerged new on the 5th) and the 19th fell on the first day of the Full. On the 2nd, as I say, she had entered her father’s coffin, under the yew tree. On the 4th she wrote “An Appearance,” her point-blank portrait of the presiding genius of her false ego–that she was about to escape from at last. She then went on, through the 4th, 5th, and 7th of April, to write her three most purely beautiful, most free-spirited, most delicately elated poems–”Crossing the Water,” “Among the Narcissi,” and “Pheasant.” What she was actually doing became clear only on the 19th! The real Pheasant, as in her poem, flew up into the real Elm. A few days before the 19th she had started a poem about the Elm itself. This had settled early into a constricted series of rhymes, in which one can see her groping for the new bearings with the old instruments. After twenty-one pages of struggle, the new bearings suddenly burst in on her, she finds the new instruments in her hands, and the voice of Ariel emerges fully fledged in “Elm.” It emerges as a bird, “a cry”:

Nightly it flaps out,
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

In other words, between the 2nd and the 19th, she has been traveling underground (”Crossing the Water”), just like Osiris in his sun-boat being transported from his death in the West to his rebirth as a divine child (himself reborn as his own divine child in the form of a Falcon) in the East. And as can be seen, “Elm” recapitulates the ritual scenario of The Bell Jar:
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root

My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence

Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.

Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Through an apocalyptic disintegration, the Elm remains as the physical continuity of the speaker, as did Victoria Lucas in the novel.

The Moon, as always, corresponds to the nucleus of the artificial ego in its matriarchal regime, while the “soft, feathery” thing, the dark fierce bird that inhabits the tree, is the voice and spirit of the authentic self–the new voice and spirit of Ariel, with its deeper story still to be told.

It should not be surprising that the novel and poems are so closely related. They were not only gestated in the same imagination (utilizing a genetic code of symbolic signs that has few equals for consistency and precision), they were delivered, so to speak, in parallel. Though The Bell Jar had been finished by late spring, 1961, the publication process dragged on throughout 1962, and the b