SYLVIA PLATH
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INDEX:
• INTRODUCTION
• BIOGRAPHY
• POEMS STUDY GUIDE:
‣ THEMES and POEMS
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
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INTRODUCTION
Sylvia Plath was a twentieth American poet and novelist best known for her
novel The Bell Jar, and for her second poetry collection Ariel. Her reputation
has evolved since her death in 1963. With her nuances, she has been classified
among the confessional poets who emerged in the United States. The
confessional poetry, also denominated in some occasions dirty poetry, is a
poetical current which emerged in the United States in the 50’s and 60’s. It is a
very personal poetry. The contents of the poems is eminently autobiographical
and are marked by supposing a profound introduction into a series of subjects
that were considered taboo at the time, such as mental illness, sexuality or
suicide. Therefore, it was quite a thematic innovation in the poetry of the time,
and very controversial on the other hand. The psychological aspect is
emphasized in a particular way by some of the authors such as Anne Sexton,
who began writing this poetry as a proposal of her therapist. This is associated
with poets such as Robert Lowell. We can precisely consider Lowell and his
work Life Studies as the precursor of this current. Plath and Sexton were
disciples of Lowell and it is evident the influence of their work on the works of
both (in the case of Sylvia Plath particularly emphasized in The Colossus. Most
of these authors had quite a tormented life. The line initiated by a confessional
poetry has exerted a crucial influence on later generations, and influence that
continues today. They tried to extract the social and formal mask of the poetic
subject through the creative act, even if it was a violent, direct or painful
experience.
However her work go beyond this label and speaks to more universal truths than
just her own emotions. It is true that a first view, her poetry can result complex.
Rhymes are not obvious and we often do not understand what she is talking
about, because she uses words in a very personal way. Many of her personal
experiences and questions of her daily life are reflected in her poems but they
appear “transmuted” to a lyrical reality and it is very difficult to identify and
understand the ultimate meaning of the poem. The notes that accompany the
poems are very helpful, so that we can locate them temporarily and also relate
them to some personal experience. If the vital moment in which the poem was
found is known, it acquires meaning.
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Sylvia Plath’s poetry illustrates an incredible capacity to commit to the art of
poetry due to many of her words and images that have become completely
rooted in the literary consciousness despite the fact that the sensational nature of
her death by suicide has lead to some critics to conflate the value of her life and
art. It is a very plastic poetry, although it requires a deep interpretation.
BIOGRAPHY
Sylvia Plath was born on 27th October, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Daughter of Otto Emil Plath, university German and biology and German
professor at the Boston University, and Aurelia Schober, English and German
teacher. Both of German descent. After the birth of her brother Warren, the
family relocated to Withdrop, coastal village which caused a crucial touch with
the sea for the little Sylvia.
With a few years old, she began writing poetry. She was very intelligent but a
quite fragile, sensitive and insecure child, insecurity which was broaden when
in 1940, her father passed away. She suffered from several depressions and
mental disorders since her adolescence. Then the family moved to Wellesley.
At high school she published her first text, a shot story entitled “And Summer
Will Not Come Again” which was published in the magazine “Seventeen”.
“Sunday At The Mintons”, published in 1952 during her university studies in
the magazine “Mademoiselle”, was her first awarded story. Two years earlier,
Sylvia had entered Smith College in Northampton. She remained in the centre
between 1950 and 1955, during which time she attempted suicide for the first
time. Later, after obtaining a Fulbright scholarship, she travelled to England to
attend the University of Cambridge. In 1956, and in the United Kingdom, he
met and married the British Ted Hughes and moved back to America.
Plath taught for a show period of time at Smith, however she quit and took a
secretarial job at a hospital in order to focus on her writing. In 1959, she and
Ted returned to England and then their first child, Frieda, was born in April
1960. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1960, The Colossus and
Other Poems. Nicholas, their second child, was born in 1962. During this time,
she worked on the poems that would constitute Ariel which was released after
her death, also she discovered her husband’s infidelity, which almost destroyed
her. They separated in the summer of 1962, and then Plath devoted herself to
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her work producing certain of her brilliant poetry. Her fist and only novel is The
Bell Jar autobiographical and signed with the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Soon
after the publication of it ( January 1963), Sylvia, poet and novelist of great
sensitivity and rich imagery who became a feminist icon committed suicide on
11th February 1963 in London.
She is buried in the cemetery of the church of Saint Thomas in the British town
of Heptonstall. She was 30 years old at the time of her death, and her chronic
depression, her emotional instability and Hughes’ love affair with Assia
Guttman, the wife of poor David Wevill, increased a vulnerability the led to the
death of young Sylvia.
Posthumously appeared the books of poems Ariel (1965), one of the key titles in
her bibliography. It featured certain of her most famous poems, including
Daddy and Lady Lazarus. Ted Hughes continued to produce new collections of
Plath’s works. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Collected Poems.
POEM STUDY GUIDE
Even though her novel The Bell Jar has carried Sylvia Plath many literary
tributes along the decades, it is not unreasonable to state that her poetry could
actually be her biggest achievement. Reckless, visceral, touching, reminiscent,
harrowing, puzzling and precious, her many poems range from simple and
lovely to dreaded and fierce. They deal with major themes such as the
preeminence of the patriarch, the sorrow os lost, the longing of creative
autonomy, suicide thoughts’ and insights into nature, sex and the body. Every
poem is widely understood in terms of its chronology, as a part of one of three
distinct phases of Sylvia’s making.
The first phase of her poetry has been considered as her “juvenilla” phase
around 1950 through 1955. They are not considered among her best work and
they are only interested by scholars. Their main theme is the challenge of being
a woman in a patriarchal society. Some of them were published in magazines,
whereas other had lived on typed copies.
The second phase is dated from between 1956 and late 1959/early 1960. During
this phase she produced most of the poetry that would later be published in her
first collection The Colossus and Other Poems. Some of these poems started to
take a “confessional” style, influenced by her teacher and mentor, Robert
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Lowell. This second phase poems look into imaginative landscapes of dreams,
explore deep into the psyche, face personal traumas and refer to social issues
and ills.
Plath wrote the poetry of her third phase during the period from 1960 until her
death in 1963. This period was quite intense as far as personal and
psychological agitation is concerned, due to the fact that both her marriage and
her mental state were falling in pieces, even though she experienced a high level
of creativity. Some of these poems examine her relationship with and hard
feelings towards her dead father.
Plath’s poetry was always a mirror where she reflected not only her conflict but
also her daily life; she poured her concerns, wishes and desires. As a young
woman she was afraid of not finding the perfect husband to be happy with. The
breakup with Ted Hughes returned the fear of not being loved, accepted:
Spinster
And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.
The ups and downs in her relationship with her husband, the violent episodes or
the melancholy are also captured in her verses:
Love Letter
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead.
Her obsession with death as a synonym of peace, absolute perfection and desire:
I am Vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
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Last Words
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
Often, the figures of her deceased father and her husband, absent, they mix, overlap
and mislead. Thus, the roles of her and her mother as abandoned wives in one way or
another:
Widow
Widow. The bitter spider sits
And sits in the center of her loveless spokes.
Death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar.
The moth-face of her husband, moonwhite and ill,
Circles her like a prey she'd love to kill
A second time, to have him near again
A paper image to lay against her heart
The way she laid his letters, till they grew warm
And seemed to give her warmth, like a live skin.
But it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one.
The other
You come in late, wiping your lips (…)
Open your handbag. What is that bad smell? (…)
Where are you going
That you suck breath like mileage?Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream.
Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself.
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THEMES and POEMS
There are several themes present in Sylvia Plath’s poetry such as death,
patriarchy, nature, motherhood, the self and the body:
DEATH. Death is an ever-present reality in Plath’s poetry, and manifests in
several different ways. Death is mostly viewed as a sinister and intimidating
end, so even though Plath’s poetry offers an alternative representation, a
fraction of her poetry conforms to the typical view on death. As an example Two
Views of a Cadaver Room is a poem which does so effectively.
(1)
The day she visited the dissecting room
They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,
Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume
Of the death vats clung to them;
The white-smocked boys started working.
The head of his cadaver had caved in,
And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old
leather.
A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and
glow.
He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.
(2)
In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter
Two people only are blind to the carrion army:
He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin
Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,
Finger a leaflet of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands
Of the death’s-head shadowing their song.
These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.
Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country
Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner.
In this poem, she attempts to be objective by writing it from a third person point
of view. The structure is also successful in doing so as it is divided into two
verses. The opposition created between the two versers creates an alarming
juxtaposition. Because the first verse adopts and attitude of reality and rationale
compared to the couples ignorance in the second verse. The first verse is further
emphasized thus foregrounding the mysteriously of death. This technique is
recurrent in Plath’s poetry an is equally effective in I am Vertical by offering
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two verses to compliment yer contrasts each other. This poem shows how little
Sylvia Plath was rooted in life. The transits in this work is evident using still the
images of nature, and at the same time keeping the topic.
In Crossing the Water the title evokes a change of shore and although it could
refer to his transfers to the United Kingdom in this case the critics think of the
change that Sylvia Plath’s poetry suffers, being a kind of “bridge” between The
Colossus and Ariel. In fact, most of the poems included in it were composed in
1960 and 1961. In this work we find poems about his perfectionism as Mirror,
about the first disappointments of love, as in Love Letter or also about death, as
in Last Words.
One common theme is the void left by her father’s death. In Full Fathom Five
she speaks of his death and burial, mourning that she is forever expelled. In The
Colossus she tries in vain to put him back together again and make him speak.
In Daddy, she goes further in claiming that she wants to kill him herself, finally
exorcising his vicious hold over her mind and her work.
Death is also dealt which in terms of suicide, which mysteriously corresponds to
her own suicide attempts and eventual death by suicide, In Lady Lazarus, she
claims that she has mastered the art of dying after trying to kill herself several
times. Death is an immensely vivid aspect of Plath’s work, both in metaphorical
and literal representations.
PATRIARCHY. The societies of the time in which Plath lived and worked was
characterized by very strict gender norms. Women were expected to stay safely
in the house, with the motherhood as their supreme joy and aim. Only few
women adventured into the arts and were frequently marginalized and despised.
In her poems, Plath depicted the severity of the domestic scene, the
disappointment of pregnancy, the desperation for her husband’s infidelity, her
tortured relationship with her father, and her attempts to find her own creative
voice amidst the crushing weight of patriarchy. She avoided the use of gentle
language and avoided writing only on traditionally "feminine" subjects. What is
most impressive is that the work remains poetic and artistic - rather than
political - because of its willingness to admit ambivalence about all these
expectations, admitting that both perspectives can be a trap.
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NATURE. Images and allusions to nature permeate Plath’s poetry. It often
evokes the sea and fields with great effect. The sea is usually associated with its
father; it is powerful, unpredictable, hypnotic and dangerous. In Full Fathom
Five, his father is depicted as a god of the sea. An image of the sea is also used
in "contusion", suggesting a terrible sense of loss and loneliness.
She also took out of her personal life, writing from horse-riding in the English
fields, in Sheep in the Mist and Ariel. In these cases, she used the activity to
suggest another world, mystical arena in which creative thought or unfettered
emotion can be expressed.
Ariel
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
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The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Ariel tells the story of the speaker’s transformative experience as she
approaches nature, and learns to give up her desire for control and accept the
madness of old mother nature. While at first the speaker is afraid of Ariel (and
who could blame her?), at the end of the poem the speaker becomes "one" with
his horse. She learns that the way to gain power is not to try to change Ariel, but
to accept his wild nature. Nature is going to do what it is going to do; we are all
along for the wild ride.
Nature also manifests itself in the bright red tulips that shake the apathetic Plath
from her post-operation stupor, insisting that she return to the world of the
living. Here, nature is a provocateur, an instigator - he doesn’t want it to give
up. Nature is an omnipresent theme in Plath’s work; it is a powerful force that is
sometimes unpredictable, but usually works to encourage his creative
production.
CONCLUSION
Sylvia Plath’s poetry may seem complex. It is true that our enjoyment requires a
little work to be able to understand it in its entirety, but to my taste, it is worth
it. It is a poetry of great intensity, that once you discover, it reaches you deep
inside. Sylvia Plath is a fascinating character and her poetry is no less.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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[Accessed 8 Apr. 2019].
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García, I. (2019). Semana Sylvia Plath. Poesía. [online]
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Biography. (2019). Sylvia Plath. [online] Available at: https://
www.biography.com/people/sylvia-plath-9442550 [Accessed 8 Apr. 2019].
Gradesaver.com. (2019). Sylvia Plath Biography | List of Works, Study Guides
& Essays. [online] Available at: https://www.gradesaver.com/author/sylvia-plath
[Accessed 8 Apr. 2019].
AlohaCriticón. (2019). Sylvia Plath: biografía y obra - AlohaCriticón. [online]
Available at: https://www.alohacriticon.com/literatura/escritores/sylvia-plath/
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