Journal of Education Culture and Society No.

1_2015 55
DOI: 10.15503/jecs20151.55.64

Sylvia Plath and the Dangers

of Biography
SELMA ASOTIý
University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Philosophy
Bosnia and Herzegovina, 71000 Sarajevo, Franje RaĀkog 1
E-mail address: [email protected]

Abstract
2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath and was commemorated
by a ßurry of new publications on the life and work of the late poet. The renewed interest in
Sylvia Plath also revitalized the decades-old debate on the interdependence of her poems
and her biography. This paper investigates and problematizes the way in which poetry
in general and the work of Sylvia Plath in particular are read and interpreted. It tries to
shed some light on the “biographical fallacy” which has for so long plagued critical appro-
aches to her work and shows ways in which S. Plath’s own poetic method differs from
the method of confessional writers such as Robert Lowell, in the hope of revealing why S.
Plath’s work cannot and should not be approached through the prism of her biography.
Keywords: confessional, poetry, Sylvia Plath, biography

It is easy to imagine the scene: the eery stillness of a snowed-in London, the
bleak light of dawn seeping through the curtains, a woman crouched over her
writing table, black ink on the pink Smith memorandum paper. The night’s dark-
ness is now petering away and the quiet streets prepare for the commotion and
bustle of life. An infant’s shriek, and the woman stops writing in mid-line, rising
from her chair. Her day has now ofÞcially begun, and it will be a while before she
returns to that stanza she has been musing over for hours. The woman is of course
Sylvia Plath, the poet living in the apartment once inhabited by William Butler
Yeats, clawing her way through a historically harsh winter and writing some of
the best poetry of her life. It is easy to give in to temptation and surrender to the
myth of Sylvia Plath. One needs only to listen to the recordings of poems she made
for the BBC in 1962: they start at a high-pitched tone of a too self-conscious perfor-
mer. But then her voice drops deeper and deeper, she nests herself in the sound
of her words, forgetting about the audience, forgetting about the interviewer Þd-
geting in his chair. You become attentive to that voice that has at one particular
moment anchored itself in a far off, inaccessible place, you follow it in its slightest
undulations, wondering where the tide will take you. By the time the reading Þni-
shes, you are thoroughly hooked.
It is easy, but irresponsible to surrender to the myth. Sylvia Plath must have
suffered the cruelest destiny to befall any artist: the facts of her life have obscured
her literary work. 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of the poet’s gruesome death
56 Transgression

and was commemorated by dozens of new publications, including two new bio-
graphies and a re- issuing of her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Nume-
rous authors have dissected the life story of Sylvia Plath with morbid curiosity,
some going so far as to try and diagnose the mental illness from which she was
suffering. Such posthumous brooding over her mental health, an insistence on the
pathological defects of her mind which were responsible for her poetry, is unique
in literary criticism. No other author has received such misplaced scrutiny.
What is it about Sylvia Plath that makes us deliberate on the facts of her biogra-
phy, and consequently, display undeserved condescension to her work? Instead
of treating her poetry for what it really is – a Þctional, artistic product of her mind
– readers and critics alike tend to view it merely as a collection of overt signals
pointing to controversial, real life events. This paper will focus on two aspects of
the problem. One is of a more general nature pertaining to the way readers usually
approach poetry. The other is more speciÞc, pertaining to the poetics of a particu-
lar literary period that has inßuenced and shaped our reading of Sylvia Plath. We
shall discuss each of them in turn in an attempt to shed some light on the genesis
of the mistreatment of the American poet.
One of the reasons behind the “biographical fallacy” is the general predisposi-
tion to view poems as expressions of the inner life of the poet. Prior to the literary
revolution that was Romanticism, poetry was interpreted in its relation to two
elements of the creative process: the referent and the recipient. In lieu of this cri-
tical practice, poetic works were considered to be either artistic mirrorings of the
outside world (i.e. had a predominantly mimetic function) or moral statements
intended to affect the attitudes and worldviews of the readers (i.e. having prag-
matism at the heart of its role) (Abrams, 1971, pp. 3-14). It was only when William
Wordsworth deÞned the lyric poem as the “spontaneous overßow of powerful
feelings” (2003, p. 8) that the critical pendulum decidedly swung to the third, cru-
cial element: the poet as the producer of the work.
The poet’s personality now found its way into the center of attention. The
lyric became an exclusively subjective form, a product of a hyper-sensitive artist
susceptible to the least irritation of the senses. The poet came to be viewed as a
medium, refracting external impressions onto the page. Therefore, W. Wordswor-
th’s own poetry was often approached through other, non-literary material, such
as his letters or biographical sketches, because to delve into the mind which pro-
duced the poem was considered as coming a step closer to unlocking the secret of
the aesthetic product itself.
It is not hard to understand this centuries long preoccupation with the Þgure
of the genius poet, this all too human need to uncover true beginnings and anchor
such a mysterious process as creative writing to an easily identiÞable source. The
institution of the author (to borrow the rhetoric of Michel Foucault) enables us
to tame the forever volatile, uncontrollable nature of discourse. And this need is
nowhere better expressed than in the case of Sylvia Plath, a poet who comforta-
bly traversed the extreme regions of human experience and laid before our eyes
all the disturbing facets of life and death. In her poems, Plath travels to the edge
of the unspeakable, brießy ßirts with the abyss, before Þnally taking a step back.
Journal of Education Culture and Society No. 1_2015 57
Through excess, she widens the expressive possibilities of language which is why
reading Sylvia Plath is always an act of blind faith, an act of choosing to step into a
newly chartered space that she has won for us. This stepping out of bounds beco-
mes all the more daunting when the reader is familiar with the sacriÞce the poet
ended up paying for her fearless transgression.
Those who like to pick through biographies of Plath in order to Þnd out more
about the real, ßesh-and-blood person behind the poems often forget that even
then they are dealing with Þctionalized accounts. Legions of readers seem to turn a
blind eye to the fact that the posthumous recountings of the poet’s life do not offer
us the “true” Sylvia Plath, but rather a subjective, carefully constructed persona,
a Sylvia Plath that evolved in the mind of the biographer. Regardless of the many
rhetorical tricks they may employ to achieve a sense of impartiality, biographers
always approach their subject from a limited, highly subjective point of view, and
therefore always reveal their particular agenda. Relying on Plath’s journals and
letters to shed more light on the biographical background to her poetry proves
to be an even more precarious task. Plath’s letters to her mother are particularly
notorious for their cheerful, optimistic tone and for the discrepancy between the
nature of real-life events and the manner in which they were conveyed to her
family. In March 1956, for example, after experiencing a bout of utter loneliness
and desolation in Paris, Plath writes in her journal: “Lazed in bed this morning,
weary from the late night and wrote a letter to mother which gave her the gay
side” (2000, p. 1544). Plath often used her journals as exercise books in which she
worked on and improved her style, wrote down ideas for future novels, lists of
possible character names, and it might be much more worthwhile to examine her
personal writing as a testing ground for poetic strategies, a free exploration of
language. The journals can hardly be a reliable source of information in the case of
a scribomaniac like Plath who considered everything an excuse for writing. Plath
had a severe knack for mythopoeia and seemed to enjoy mythologizing herself
primarily. Let us not forget this fact when we scour through her journal entries
to uncover concrete impulses behind her poems: even when writing for herself,
Plath never stopped being a writer, she never stopped using language as a coping
mechanism, a means to manipulate and transcend reality.
But there is a graver fault still to be found in this incessant treatment of Plath’s
poems as biographical records. Underlining the effort to extract the life from the
poetry is an anachronistic, naive faith that language is benign, a thing supple and
translucent, a system of signiÞers too ready to yield before an inquisitive eye the
bare, denoted signiÞed. It means to deny the poems of Sylvia Plath the nature of
aesthetic objects, to deny they are poetry at all. Words in poetry, as Jean-Paul Sartre
noted, are not signs but things, “natural things which sprout naturally upon the
earth like grass and trees” (1988, p. 29). Under the all-encompassing gaze of the
demiurg poet words congeal into sonorous bodies, soaking up the world and mir-
roring it in its myriad aspects. Nothing escapes the almighty pull of words, their sin-
gle-minded, autonomous will. Whatever trace of the poet’s personal preoccupations
and impulses might exist, they are destined to become subsumed within the internal
logic of the word-object. Speaking of the difference between prose and poetry, J.P.
58 Transgression

Sartre writes: “In so far as the writer of prose exhibits feelings, he illustrates them;
whereas, if the poet injects his feelings into his poem, he ceases to recognize them;
the words take hold of them, penetrate them, and metamorphose them; they do not
signify them, even in his eyes. Emotion has become thing; it now has the opacity of
things; it is compounded by the ambiguous properties of the words in which it has
been enclosed. And above all, there is always much more in each phrase, in each
verse (...) The word, the phrase-thing, inexhaustible as things, everywhere overßow
the feeling which has produced them” (1988, p. 34). Denying this peculiar nature of
language in poetry seems especially wrong in the case of Sylvia Plath, a disciplined
wordsmith who displayed an acute sense for the materiality of the word, its dizzy-
ing connotative depths, its magical swaying rhythms.

Now we come to the other reason behind the biographical (mis)reading of

Sylvia Plath: the labeling of her work as “confessional”. Confessional poetry was
a mode of writing born in mid-twentieth century America which brought about
a decisive break with Modernist formalism and insistence on impersonality. The
term was Þrst used by Macha Louis Rosenthal who applied it disparagingly in
a review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, the poetry collection which marked the
beginning of the confessional trend in literature. M.L. Rosenthal wrote: “Lowell
removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to
think of Life Studies as a series of personal conÞdences, rather shameful, that one
is honor-bound not to reveal” (Dowson, 2011, p. 65). This sense of impropriety
was undoubtedly caused by the confessional breakthrough into thematic Þelds
and manners of address unbeknownst to earlier poetic works, especially those of
the High Modernists who preceded Plath’s generation and whose sense of poetic
decorum and insistence on the technical achievements of the poem the confes-
sionals rebelled against. David Dalton Yezzi provides us with a useful working
description of the confessional style:
“What makes a poem confessional is not only its subject matter – e.g., family,
sex, alcoholism, madness – or the emphasis on self, but also the directness with
which such things are handled. Unßinching and generally extreme in their diction
and address (certainly compared to what preceded them), the poems of Snod-
grass, Lowell, Sexton, and Plath comprise a wide tonal range from sad whisper
to hectoring squawk. What they have in common, what sets them apart from
other poems that incorporate details from life, is their sense of worn-on-the-sle-
eve self-revelation and their artful simulation of sincerity. By relying on facts, on
»real« situations and relationships, for a poem’s emotional authenticity, the poet
makes an artiÞce of honesty. Confessional poems, in other words, lie like truth”
(Yezzi, 1998).

D.Yezzis’s statement of the “artiÞce of honesty” is very important in under-

standing the nature of the confession in poetry. Faced with an arbitrary system of
signs, an endless chain of signiÞers referring back to one another, a web of silences
that is language, the poet can only offer up an illusion of truthfulness. Therefore,
biography once again fails to provide a reliable means of interpretation. Once the
Journal of Education Culture and Society No. 1_2015 59
poet steps into the symbolic order, he/she must negotiate between experience and
language. There is no absolute truth hiding outside words – words are their own
truth.
The scandal of the confessional mode of writing and its use of subject matter
previously thought unÞt for inclusion in poetry can only be understood in relation
to the era in which it originated. Cold War America was a place of shifting notions
and values. One of the most important debates at the time centered around the
issue of privacy. As Deborah Nelson notes in Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America,
the right to privacy was long considered to be one of the most important features
of democratic societies, opposing the intrusiveness of totalitarian regimes. Howe-
ver, Cold War surveillance and other developments in all spheres of life brought
into question the neat division between the private and the public sphere. Old
notions of privacy being tied to the topos of the family home underwent serious
revision as the home ceased to be a unique respite from public affairs and instead
became a new political battleground. Not only did the state now actively pene-
trate the home, but the mixing of the private and public spheres also developed in
the opposite direction, through the shift in the use of confession. Lowell enraged
Rosenthal and many other readers and critics by daring to topple the sanctity of
the patriarchal home, Þrmly established on taciturn notions of decorum and pro-
priety. Take, for example, this poem by Lowell, Father’s Bedroom:

“In my Father’s bedroom:

blue threads as thin
as pen-writing on the bedspread,
blue dots on the curtains,
a blue kimono,
Chinese sandals with blue plush straps.
The broad-planked ßoor
had a sandpapered neatness.
The clear glass bed-lamp
with a white doily shade
was still raised a few
inches by resting on volume two
of Lafcadio Hearn’s
Glimpses of unfamiliar Japan.
Its warped olive cover
was punished like a rhinoceros hide.
In the ßyleaf:
»Robbie from Mother«.
Years later in the same hand:
»This book has had hard usage
On the Yangtze River, China.
It was left under an open
porthole in a storm«” (1980, p. 75).
60 Transgression

The very title of the poem indicates Lowell’s gigantic leap into forbidden doma-
ins. The poetic persona (who is identical to the author) is stepping into the con-
secrated place of any household - the parental bedroom. But the offense is aggra-
vated by the fact that it is the patriarch of the household who is being subjected
to the prying investigation. Instead of a domineering, controlling Þgure, Lowell’s
father is the dominated one, vulnerable to the intrusions of others, devoid of a
private space, whereas in the traditional patriarchal code the Father was the one
who ensured the integrity of the home: the privacy of the family circled around
the patriarch as the bearer of the family name and the keeper of its sanctity. Thro-
ughout Life Studies, the father Þgure is diminished and ridiculed, turned into a
mockery of the earlier patriarchal sovereign. Lowell invests his father with an air
of forbidden femininity: in Father’s Bedroom, the poet’s eye is Þxed on the delicacy
and neatness of the objects. His descriptions convey an air of the fragile quality of
things left behind. Together with the poet, we are surveying the deserted cham-
bers of a failed monarch; traces of royal blue speak of his conspicuous absence, the
estrangement between father and son underscored by the exoticism of faraway
lands, of “Chinese sandals with blue plush straps”. The acidic rains of time have
slowly nibbled away at Lowell’s aristocratic family lineage, just as the storm puni-
shed the olive covers of the book.
Comparing Lowell’s poem to Sylvia Plath’s Daddy might be a good starting
point from which to elaborate Sylvia Plath’s approach to poetry and the way she
intersects with and differs from her contemporaries. In her essay Sylvia Plath and
Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration, critic Margaret Dickie Uroff draws attention
to the different usage of poetic persona in Lowell and Plath. She writes:
“Lowell himself has said that while he invented some of his autobiography,
he nonetheless wants the reader to feel it is true, that he is getting the real Robert
Lowell. The literal self in Lowell’s poetry is to be sure a literary self, but fairly con-
sistently developed as a self-deprecating, modest, comic Þgure with identiÞable
parents, summer homes, experiences at particular addresses. When he discloses
under these circumstances his weaknesses, his ineptitude, his misery, his inßicting
of pain on others, he is in fact revealing information that is humiliating or prejudi-
cial to himself. In this sense, the person in the poem is making an act of confession,
and, although we as readers have no power to forgive, Lowell’s self-accusatory
manner makes it impossible to judge. We are not outraged but chastened by such
revelations. With Plath, it is otherwise. The person in her poem calls certain people
father or mother but her characters lack the particularity of Commander and Mrs.
Lowell. They are generalized Þgures not real-life people, types that Plath manipu-
lates dramatically in order to reveal their limitations. Precisely because they are
such types, the information that Plath reveals about them is necessarily prejudicial
and has consequently misled some readers who react with hostility to what she
has to reveal” (Uroff, 1977).

Lowell does not conceal the personal I. His poetry gains universal meaning
because the poet and the world mirror each other: the story of the slow decline
of Lowell’s family is a metaphor for the downfall of an entire social order. When
Journal of Education Culture and Society No. 1_2015 61
Lowell speaks of his suffering, his mental breakdown, his inability to be a good
father, he is at the same time diagnosing the state of the world. Although the term
confessional has come to denote narcissism and a move away from society, Lowel-
l’s poems are social in their nature. In them, Lowell inscribes not simply his per-
sonal anguish and fears, but the fears of an entire generation caught in the bedlam
of Cold War politics.
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is equally political. It brings into the public sphere those
aspects of the feminine domestic experience which have been systematically
ignored and excluded from public discourse. Plath voices the anxieties of the self
trapped within a hostile world, she transforms the terms of her conÞnement by
bringing them into the creative process where she can manipulate and transcend
them. Plath may start off from concrete experience but unlike Lowell she seeks
to hide the personal I, or at least move away from it as much as possible. Plath’s
formal ingenuity, her lucid rhythms and frequent use of irony serve as methods
of detachment. The Daddy Plath speaks of stops being the biographical Otto Plath
and becomes an element in Plath’s unique mythological system. It therefore seems
particularly unfair to reduce to biographical trivia a body of work of a poet who
desperately sought to transcend biography, to work out a way of verbalizing the
most traumatic, silence-stricken experiences.
Daddy, “the »Guernica« of modern poetry” in which Plath managed “the clas-
sical act of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a
code of plain statement” (Steiner, 1965), contains the oft repeated narrative of libe-
ration, a mythological pattern that seems to structure most of Plath’s poetry. The
gruesome showdown with the father Þgure starts off with a grotesque rhythm of
a nursery rhyme:

“You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal.

… I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak” (1981, p. 222).
62 Transgression

In Daddy, decoding the nightmares of personal history leads to an attempt

to exorcise the demons haunting the collective social body. Therefore, bre-
aking free cannot be done by revisiting one’s private past, as is the case in
Lowell, but by shedding away the burden of an unwanted, uncalled for histo-
rical heritage. In both Father’s Bedroom and Daddy, the speakers Þnd themse-
lves in foreign territory, feeling alien in spaces which were supposed to be
their home. But while Lowell’s space is the family house where he is trying
to reconstruct the story of his father and his own childhood, Plath megaloma-
niacally traverses the ghastly landscape of post-WWII Europe in an attempt
to locate and overcome the shackles that bind her. Her outrageous hyperboles
testify to her desire of endowing her poems with an almost cosmic relevance.
Lines such as: “The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God/
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility” (Plath, 1981, p. 172) are not
mere evidence of Plath’s ego mania. They are expressions of her instinctual desire
to detach herself as much as possible from private concerns and achieve a univer-
sal appeal. Whether she succeeds in it or not is a matter of poetics not biography.
Speaking of her approach to poetry in a 1962 interview, Plath states: “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 terriÞc,
like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to
manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind. 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 rele-
vant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and
Dachau and so on” (Orr, n.d.). Plath obviously felt that her interest in portraying
aberrant states of mind and extreme experiences might lead to nothing more than
hysterical “cries from the heart”. Therefore she took great pains to create poetic
personas, Þctionalized speakers whose adversities she could then explore from a
safe distance and reveal the universal aspects of their situation.
In Daddy, the roots of the speaker’s pain do not lie in an isolated, private expe-
rience but are brought into connection with a civilizatory affront. While through
confession Lowell hopes to descend into the most distant depths of his identity,
to Þll in the gaps in his memories in order to re-afÞrm himself, Sylvia Plath does
not want to confess her being, and thereby validate it. On the contrary: she wants
to break free from herself, she seeks an escape. In her essay A Fine, White Flying
Myth: The Life/Work of Sylvia Plath, Sandra Gilbert describes Plath’s “mythological
method” in the following manner: “Being enclosed – in plaster, in a bell jar, a
cellar, or a wax house – and then being liberated from an enclosure by a madde-
ned or suicidal or »hairy and ugly avatar« of the self is, I would contend, at the
heart of the myth that we piece together from Plath’s poetry, Þction, and life (…)
The story told is invariably a story of being trapped, by society or by the self as an
agent of society, and then somehow escaping or trying to escape” (1979, p. 251).
What Plath offers through her numerous personas is a host of planned, highly
Journal of Education Culture and Society No. 1_2015 63
controlled performances in which she manages to reinvent herself and constantly
widen the scope of her experience.

There is one more aspect of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and confessional writing
we need to consider. Foucault describes confession as “a ritual of discourse in
which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that
unfolds within a power relation, for one does not confess without the presence (or
virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor, but the authority
who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order
to judge, punish, forgive, console and reconcile (…) The agency of domination
does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the
one who listens and says nothing; not in the one who knows and answers, but in
the one who questions and is not supposed to know” (1978, p. 61-62). If confes-
sion is to have a therapeutic effect, if it is to allow an objective distancing from the
self in order to uncover the truth of one’s experience, then the virtual presence
of a future reader/listener is its indispensable part. In Lowell’s case, the readers
are his silent accomplices. The simple lexicon and syntax of Life Studies points to
Lowell’s desire to come across, to be understood. We embark on the journey into
the darkest pits of the poet’s psyche with an empowering feeling that our presence
alone is able to render true the agonizing outpourings of the poet’s heart. Poetry
is no longer, as John Stuart Mill claimed, overheard. Instead, the poet asks for our
participation, he invites us to bid our ears to his woe.
On the other hand, one of the most disturbing aspects of reading Sylvia Pla-
th’s poetry is her perfect contempt for the audience. Lady Lazarus might perform
her “big strip tease” before a bustling “peanut-crunching crowd”, but in the Ariel
collection as a whole, the reader is not needed. Plath is not seeking our sympa-
thy, validation or consolation. She is single-mindedly moving to a destination not
reachable to us, she is “the arrow,/The dew that ßies/Suicidal, at one with the
drive/Into the red/Eye, the cauldron of morning” (1981, p. 239). In her great jour-
ney of liberation, of breaking free from an imposed, stilted self, Plath disturbs
us by not needing us. At her worst, she recedes into a sort of isolated autarchy,
becoming stuck in a vivid but also hermetic mental landscape. Once again, the
reader does not overhear the poetry: he/she becomes trapped in the poet’s mind,
a hostile place Þlled with undecipherable yelps and shrieks. At her best, Plath
achieves a controlled autonomous expression, with universal signiÞcance.

In conclusion: using biographical investigation as a reliable interpretative

method should be avoided both as a general reading practice and as a way of
approaching the poetry of Sylvia Plath. The peculiar nature of words in poetry
makes biographical reading a rather futile endeavor. Although personal experien-
ces are very often the impetus behind a poetic work, this raw material never esca-
pes the totalitarian will of the creative process which distills from it the meaning
and the purpose required by the poem. It is this self-willed nature of poetry that
allowed Sylvia Plath to express that which was stubbornly steeped in silence. It
allowed her not to confess herself like the majority of her contemporaries, but to
64 Transgression

multiply and disÞgure herself, thus galloping away into psychic territories that
would have otherwise remained outside of her reach. Her poetry is conceived in a
moment of impenetrable isolation and silence before exploding into the world in a
fury of language that will spare no reader and revere no confessor.
Plath’s premature death means we will never know in which direction she
would have evolved as a poet had she lived on. The popularity of poems such as
Daddy and Lady Lazarus has obscured the more satisfying achievements, such as
Berck-Plage and Edge in which, as Helen Vendler notes, Plath achieves an impecca-
ble, impersonal style (2010, p. 55). But we do own Sylvia Plath a closer examination
of her poetic oeuvre without the intrusions of the spectacular biographical facts.
A poet who did not mind sacriÞcing her life for the “blood-jet of poetry” surely
deserves to be treated as a poet (a good or a bad one, it is up to the individual taste,
but a poet nonetheless) and not as a study case for pathological states of mind.

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