[ VOLUME 6 I ISSUE 2 I APRIL– JUNE 2019] E ISSN 2348 –1269, PRINT ISSN 2349-5138

Sylvia Plath’s Fits and Her Confessional Poetry

Dr. Imran Majeed Bhat

Lecturer in Department of Education

Received: May 09, 2019 Accepted: June 15, 2019

ABSTRACT: Confessional poetry designates a type of narrative or lyric verse which deals with the factual
and intimate mental and physical experience of a poet’s own life. Much of this kind of poetry was written
against the demand of impersonality by T.S. Eliot. Its subject matter is secular and so we do not find
anything religious in it as in Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ (AD 400). Confessional poetry, then, differs from
Romantic poetry too, even though, the Romantic poets represent their own circumstances, experiences and
feelings. It is so because in Confessional poetry, the poets give startling details including sexual
experiences, private or clinical matters about themselves, mental anguish, drug–usage and suicidal
impulses. It is the poetry which springs from the personal life of the [Link] poet expresses his/her
private experiences, Alcoholism, Masturbation as well as, feelings of depression and suicidal attempts
without any shame and fear. This sort of expression gives the poet a feeling of relief and truthfulness. The
confessional poets adopt personal history or autobiography as their central theme and their method
is that of direct expression. This style of writing is greatly associated with such poets as Robert Lowell, W
.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Confessional poetry gave a new direction to
poetry and thus, influenced a good number of young poets. It may be safely said that these poets are not
simply interested in recording their emotional---selves. They pay good attention to craft and
construction of their poetry. They make their souls naked to get a psychic relief which is of great
therapeutic value to them.

Key Words: Confessional poetry, psychic relief, Emotional-selves, private experiences, Alcoholism

Introduction:
Coming back to Sylvia Plath’s life and works a reader gets wonder-struck to see such a young woman with
girlish features wholly dipped into a sea of confessional poetry. In her poetry Plath breaks the taboos that
were not supposed to be broken by women writers in the [Link] Plath this type of poetry provided
the most intimate type of communication with her readers, creating a strong empathy with them. The
whole range of Salvia Plath’s Confessional poetry is full of her exposure of her own life and her feelings. It
is closely linked to her personal life including her father’s death and her marriage, rather miss-marriage to
Ted Hughes. These poems are touching and Confessional in style and construction as well. They express
her lack of interest in life and show her great desire to die. Plath says what she is internally forced to say.
She cannot help it. Even her husband, Hughes admits in an interview to ‘The Paris Review’ that Confession
represents something that needs to be said. He further says that confessing is somehow similar to
breathing and this is one of the reasons why Confessional poetry has become so valuable, because it
speaks from the heart. M.L Rosenthal himself admits that one of the greatest themes of modernity and
therefore, of the Confessional poetry, is the description of the poet’s private life, especially when submitted
to the stress of psychic crises. It is agreed upon by all hands that her contribution to English poetry is great.
She published her first poem at the age of eight in the ‘Boston Sunday Herald’ the time round about her
father’s death. While she continued to write afterwards, she was a professional writer for only the last seven
years of her short life span of about thirty years. During these seven years she had composed about two
hundred and fifty poems, all burdened with imagination, pathos and imaginary. Considering her short life-
span, we can say that she has contributed much to English poetry and her poetry is so rich that many of her
poems can stand so high as the poetry of the great Classical and Romantic poets. One wonders how an
immature person could give such great thoughts. Her poetry has even baffled great critics. Tim Kendall
writes in his book ‘Sylvia Path. A critical study’, “We are still learning how to read Plath’s later work. Poetry
offers few more challenging and unsettling experience.” Elena Ciobanu expresses the same thoughts about
Plath’s poetry, when she says in her study ‘Sylvia Plath’s poetry: The Metamorphoses of the Poetic self’. The
essence of her poetic being has remained fundamentally unapprehended and the necessary aesthetics we
need in order to understand Plath’s poetics has not yet been invented. All this suggests that much of her
poetry remains an enigma even till today. Here, like many other critics, Jocqueline Rose Comes to our
rescue and she prescribes a safe course for us when she says in her book ‘The Hunting of Sylvia Plath’, “It is
impossible to read Plath independently of the frame, the surrounding discourses , through which her
338𝗓 IJRAR- International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews Research Paper
[VOLUME 6 I ISSUE 2 I APRIL – JUNE 2019] e ISSN 2348 –1269, Print ISSN 2349-5138
[Link] Cosmos Impact Factor 4.236
writing is presented. The word ‘frame’ in the statement of Rose surely means the biographical data
concerning Plath’s life and death. It is but natural that the critics largely should be driven to this point. So
splendid poetry and so early a death give pertinent clues to these critics. She suffered depression all her life.
So, Plath’s poetry in relation to her Psychic crises gives me the title of this paper. I got helped in
this connection by Brian Cooper’s book ‘Sylvia Plath and the depression Continuum’ which impressed upon
me that she suffered fits of depression continuously. Jane Feinman also wrote a book called ‘Ryme, Reasons
and Depression’ to this effect. Vanessa Thorpe is sorry for not helping Sylvia Plath in her worst days of
depression for not helping her. He says,” I failed her. I was thirty and stupid” She was a promising child and
she got her first poem published when aged eight only around the time when her father died. Otto Plath
died shortly after a close friend had died of lung cancer. Otto Plath had become convinced that he too was
suffering from lung cancer. He proved superstitious and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had
progressed beyond cure. Her father’s death affected Plath much. She had been raised as a Unitarian
Christian and after her father’s loss she remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life. There is
no denying that one of Plath’s main lyrical occupations was “Death”. Her first volume of poetry ‘The
Colossus and other Poems’ displays an obsession with estrangement, motherhood and destruction in
contemporary world. In the poem ‘Daddy’ much of her anger is directed against her father whom she cities
as a muse and target of scorn. Sylvia says,
O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the forum
And, then she confers historical and mythical allusions to Nazis and the Holocaust. In this way she offers
depth and closeness to her psychic distress. In this poem, the speaker compares her father and husband
with vampires saying they betrayed her and drank her blood dry.
The Vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a y ear
Seven, years, if you want to know
She tells her father to give up and be done. She even goes beyond it and says:
Daddy, Daddy you bastard
“Daddy” actually gives us a story for her volatile opinion of men. It gives us the roots of Plath’s relationship
with the first man of her life-----her father. Moreover, she makes the use of Holocaust imagery in this poem
and, in this way promotes the idea of an oppressor and an oppressed. Her father, being overbearing, is
linked to a Nazi and she herself is linked to a Jew. One should not presume that she hated her father as such
though she never missed his stern attitude. Commenting up her first nine years, she writes in one of her last
prose pieces, ‘they sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle- beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a white
flying mith’. She gave these comments when she was mature in age, but in actual sense, this period of her
childhood was never a ‘myth’ for her. This period had left a deep impression upon her heart.
Plath attended Smith College in 1950, where she excelled academically. This was rather a benign
period for her after her childhood disturbance. She edited ‘The Smith Review’, and was awarded a much-
coveted position as guest editor at ‘Mademoiselle’ magazine after her third year in the college.
Unfortunately, the fit of depression came over her again and she slashed her leg to see if she had enough
courage to commit suicide. We cannot say that she was turned mad but we cannot deny the fact that she
was highly disturbed inwardly. Many of the events that took place that summer were used later in her semi-
autobiographical novel ‘The Bell Jar’. The heroine of the novel is surely the duplicate of Plath of this period.
She was treated for depression by electroconvulsive therapy. The fit was so great that Plath made
her first medically documented suicide attempt by taking her mother’s pills and then crawling under her
house. This happened in August1953 when she was barely 21 years old. The theory of “cause and effect”
fails here. She is a brilliant student and tender of age and cannot possibly be blamed of love sickness, often
a precedent of light-mindedness. Then she spent about six months in psychiatric care under the guidance
of Ruth Beuscher and received more and more electric and insulin shock treatment. Strange it seems that
her stay at Melean Hospital was paid for by Olive Higgins, who had recovered from a mental breakdown
herself. Her mental graph takes a zigzag structure, sometimes up and sometime down. She again feels good
and she is talking in terms of literature, again productive. She works hard on her thesis ‘The Magic Mirror:
A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky’s Novels’. Thus, she graduated from Smith College with highest
honors. It seemed strange that a depressed mind like that of Plath works hard on the works of
Dostoyevsky, a man whose mind was fall of Hallucinations and who was often called mad. It shows that
Plath’s mind was an abnormal one, not in the negative sense but in positive sense. Certainly her mind was
the one with above normal capacity. She was having a sensitive heart to feel in high measures anything good
Research Paper IJRAR- International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews 339𝗓
[ VOLUME 6 I ISSUE 2 I APRIL– JUNE 2019] E ISSN 2348 –1269, PRINT ISSN 2349-5138
or bad. This sensitivity of heart shook Plath’s mind and soul from early childhood to her virtual end. Rather
ended her life too soon. It was a period of less stress and strain for Plath and she got a scholarship to study
at Newham College, where she actively wrote her poetry and got it published in the student newspaper
“Varsity.” Everyone can see that it was a period of ‘ease’ with her. She spent her first year winter and spring
holidays travelling around Europe. She met poet Ted Hugges in February 1956 at a party in Cambridge and
married him in June 1956. She returned to Newham to start her second year. Unfortunately, Plath, as well as
her husband becomes interested in astrology and the supernatural. All this shows that the strain of light-
mindedness was still there and that too on its upward motion .The couple moved to Boston where Plath
took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. It shows some psychic
tendency of Plath to be interested in psychiatric Hospitals. In the evenings she sat on seminars given by
Robert Lowell and attended by such writers as Anne Sexton and Starbuck. Her ‘fit’ again comes over her and
she openly discussed her depression with Lowell and told of her suicide attempts to Sexton. Here Sexton
advised her to write from a more female perspective and Plath began to do so. Plath resumed
psychoanalytic treatment. In 1959, the pair reached to New York State. Here she learns to be true to her
‘Weird nesses’ but still anxious to write confessionally from deeply personal and private material. How
was she interested in Sexton. It is not so simple as to say that both of them were simply confessionalists.
‘Ariel’s’ publication in 1965 precipated her rise of fame and the critics saw the collection as the charting of
Plath’s increasingly desperation or death wish. She simply did not wish for death, she proved it by her
suicide. She knew the art of ‘dying’.

WORKS CITED
1. Howe, Irving. The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, Ed. Edward
Butscher New York: Dodd, Mead. Print.
2. Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. London: New York: Harper & [Link].
3. Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. London: Faber and Faber,2000. Print.
4. . -------.Johnn Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings. London: Faber and Faber1977. Print.
5. Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. USA: Schaffner Press, 1976. Print. | Kumar, Virendra.
Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Self. New Delhi: Radha Publication, 1988. Print.
6. Newman, Charles, ed. The art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. London: Faber and Faber, 1970. Print. | Pandya,
Shiva Murty, ed. Essays on Modern American Poetry. New Delhi: [Link] Service, 1971. Print.
7. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. London: Faber and Faber, [Link]. | Vendler, Helen, ed. Voices & Visions: The Poet in
America. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company ltd., 1987. Print.
8. Vendler, Helen, ed. Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath. London: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Print.

340𝗓 IJRAR- International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews Research Paper