The death throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

by Joyce Carol Oates

I am not cruel, only truthful
The eye of a little god…

Plath, Mirror Tragedy is not a woman, however gifted, dragging her shadow around in a circle, or analyzing with dazzling scrupulosity the stale, boring inertia of the circle; tragedy is cultural, mysteriously enlarging the individual so that what he has experienced is both what we have experienced and what we need not experience - because of his, or her, private agony. It is proper to say that Sylvia Plath represents for us a tragic figure involved in a tragic action, and that her tragedy is offered to us as a near - perfect work of art, in her books The Colossus (1960), The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1965), and the posthumous volumes published in 1971, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. This essay is an attempt to analyze Plath in terms of her cultural significance, to diagnose, through Plath’s poetry, the pathological aspects of our era that make a death of the spirit inevitable - for that era and all who believe in its assumptions. It is also based upon the certainty that Plath’s era is concluded and that we may consider it with the sympathetic detachment with which we consider any era that has gone before us and makes our own possible: the cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The “I” of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature - as in the poem “Mirror,” the eye of a little god who imagines itself without preconceptions, “unmisted by love or dislike.” This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the participant in a dramatic action he does not know is “tragic.” He dies, and only we can see the purpose of his death - to illustrate the error of a personality who believed itself godlike.
Leggi il resto di questo articolo »

Sylvia Plath’s “Berck-Plage,” which contains 126 lines of seemingly unmitigated malaise and funereal gloom, stands in many readers’ estimation as one of her heaviest and least appealing works, even considering its autobiographical significance. The occasion for the poem is described by Ted Hughes in a note to the poem written in 197O:

In June, 1961, we had visited Berck-Plage, a long beach and resort on the coast of France north of Rouen.
Some sort of hospital or convalescent home for the disabled fronts the beach. It was one of her nightmares stepped into the real world. A year later - almost to the day - our next door neighbour, an old man [Percy Key] died after a short grim illness during which time his wife repeatedly needed our help. In this poem that visit to the beach and the death and funeral of our neighbour are combined. [1]
Leggi il resto di questo articolo »