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Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Collections “The Colossus” and “Ariel”

Article in Journal of Literature and Art Studies · December 2022

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Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Collections “The Colossus” and “Ariel”

Nana Gagua
Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University, Tbilisi, Georgia


The purpose of the present article is to explore two main poetry collections of Sylvia Plath. Poems for “The
Colossus” and “Ariel” were written in different times and life stages of the poet. “The Colossus” is the beginning
of her full life as a woman and a poet and “Ariel” is telling us about her final years and predicts the tragical
ending that she had chosen. Both books are rich with different characters, poetical symbols and themes.

Keywords: Sylvia Plath, poetry, confessionalism, The Colossus, Ariel, Ted Hughes

Introduction
Sylvia, born in Boston in 1932, was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor Otto Plath and
his former student Aurelia Schober. The life of the poet drastically changed after her father’s death. Some of
her poems, including the famous poem “Daddy”, is about the poet’s complicated relationship with her strict dad.
Sylvia had strange reaction on her dad’s death, she took it as a betrayal, an escape. Which finally ended their
difficult contradictory relationship and it became Plath’s property. Financial problems made the Plath family to
move to another state. Sylvia was a gifted student, she had received many awards and scholarships. She studied
in Smith College with a scholarship. A successful period lasted with the winning scholarship in literature
competition of magazine Mademoiselle, where she got prestigious guest title of the magazine board. During her
final years of studying at University the symptoms of heavy depression started, which finally led to her death.
At the age of 19 she tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. Luckily she survived. The experience of
depressive attacks and recovery was a base of her novel The Bell Jar. Her famous two poetry collection “The
Colossus” and “Ariel” describe her personal and writing development.
Poetry collection The Colossus by American poet Sylvia Plath was first published in 1960 by the
publishing house Heinemann. Ariel was published by the company Knopf and ten new poems were added.
Plath’s poems caught attention briefly and were applauded by the literary critics. In 1963 when the shocking
news about her suicide spread people started reading more intensively, her recent extraordinary poems that
were published in her poetry book Ariel in 1965.
Many of Plath’s poems are haunted with feelings of fear, her empathy toward the animals is growing.
Suicide is evaluated as a pervasive act. The poetry collection Ariel was a new direction for the poet herself. It
was a realization of her ceaseless search for of the poet, who was looking for her way in the beginning.
Perphaps, the poetry collection The Collossus, from the fictional point of view, is on the same level as
Ariel but Ariel has the glimpse of Sylvia Plath’s end of life, some foreshadowing. This is clear in her poem

Nana Gagua, Ph.D. student, Institute of American Studies, Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University.
 SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY COLLECTIONS “THE COLOSSUS” AND “ARIEL” 1247

“Two views of a Cadavar Room”, in her terrible echo of T.S.Eliot’s The love song of J. Alferd Prufrock: “On
their jars the snails-nosed babies moon and glow” (Plath, 1998, p. 5). The same idea is seen in that whole poem.
The first two parts are dedicated to a girl’s visit to a morgue where she sees how the boys are working on the
corpse. In the second part there is a description of a war scene. The poet is showing us a conflict between love
and death. She is trying to connect her personal life experience to the picture seen in the morgue or generally to
the war topic. In the poem “Suicide off Egg Rock” Sylvia Plath is doing a reconstruction of protagonist’s
feeling in the moment of drowning and when her body was becoming like a lifeless object.
A much more characteristic poem is “Hardcastle Crags”. It shows an absolute distance from the city and
urban landscape, without any self-pity and sentiments. But the same concrete and motionless as a rock, as in the
poem “The stones”. The word “vision” when used in connection with Sylvia Plath’s poems should not be
understood literally but in its philosophical sense. Her works’ positive side is discovered in her fascination with
the nature. It is well described in the light passages of her poems. A brilliant moment of such fascination is seen
in the beginning of the poem “The Eye-Mote”:
Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores… (Plath, 1998, p. 12)

The first poem of The Colossus is dedicated to her late father. It is about a contempt toward her father and
the feeling of a death. The Colossus expresses the author’s daily routine work: editing texts and fragments,
collecting pieces, creating something as a whole. The poems from The Colossus are read as one, whole and are
inseparable. As for the second poetry collection Ariel, it tells us about how Plath is trying to reconcile with
crime, mortality history (of personal and humanity). Earth destruction by human’s ignorance when they depend
on it, manslaughter in Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau, threatening with nuclear bombs and radioactive fossils,
cruel destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—Sylvia was worried about all these issues. This was a reflection
in her own mirror. With age she became worried about the discovery of her irrational hatred toward her father
Otto Emil Plath. Otto was an etymologist of German origins. Plath felt resentment toward her husband, British
poet Ted Hughes. She was angry at her forced role of a housewife:
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk (Plath, 2004. p. 11)

The US poets of the 1950s have some common characteristics. The best ones write with a perfect
technique, intellectually and sensibly. But after reading their books, some readers are left dissatisfied,
especially the ones whose minds are still in the process of formation. For the young poets, who shared the
conceptual framework of the 1920-30s, rational approaches were not useful. Quite often in their poetry the
universe is substantial unity without thinking and poetry. Where there is not a stream of thoughts that would
take objects in one direction. In the world of poetry there are many good poems that describe everyday life.
Those poems are written by means of metaphysical and psychological observations. There are some poems
seen by immigrants or tourists perspective (especially by American poets on Rome, Florence etc.). Those
1248 SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY COLLECTIONS “THE COLOSSUS” AND “ARIEL”

poems are personal characteristic poems and do not represent any importance for poetry. Many poets feel that
protest against our sensitive condition is nonsense and it is better to write about what you feel.
In The Colossus almost all poems are perfect. A poet is mastering, controlling of a poem’s form and
intonation, keeping rhythmical variation relevance, using vocabulary correctly and observing on events that
often causes astonishment but is always exact:
the waves
spewed relics clicker masses in the wind, or ( the place in laboratory),
In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. (Plath, 1998, p. 5)

“Poem for a Birthday” describes a pregnant women’s feeling. The author had learned about pregnant
women’s colorful dreams and was writing bravely about it. In “Metaphor” a focus is on pregnant women’s
experienced emotions, visual accent is expressed and noticeable. A poet describes perspective, paints her future
life where we see her as a spinster, a whore or being a suicidal. The early poetry of Sylvia Plath is full of such
phobias.
Sylvia Plath was one of the distinguished poets of the 20th century. Even before her suicide, she already
had many admirers in literature circles. In the following years her works attracted a lot of readers, who in her
verses saw a poet’s trying to talk about despair, strong emotions and obsession with death. In a The New York
Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oats described Plath as “one of the most famous and controversy, postwar
poet, who wrote in English”. Plath’s extremely autobiographical poems describe her rational sadness,
complicated marriage with Ted Hughes, and the author’s unresolved conflict with parents, herself and her
views.
Socialist Margaret Ritz points out that it does not matter whether Plath writes about nature or a person’s
social inequality, she removes “a frame of politeness” from any topic, she is swimming against the tide. The
poet in her writing described primitive forces and primary fears. With this she clearly and openly addressed the
tense situation that was floating on the surface of American life after the war.
Some feminists, described Plath as a woman who was sacrificed to her strict father, treacherous husband
and unplanned motherhood. Some poets consider her as a confessional poet that speaks about chaotic,
noncontrollable subjects that were needed by our conscience. With the book Ariel Sylvia became a popular
American poet whose categorization in a narrow literature frame was not so simple.
English poet and critic, Alfred Alvarez in his book The Savage God wrote that with the poems of Ariel,
collected and published by Ted Hughes, Plath made poetry and death inseparable notions. One could not exist
without the other. It is interesting that the majority of the poems are read as if they were written after the poet’s
death. Robert Warren called Ariel a unique book: “It is more than that book, it is like a wind’s cruel blowing,
like someone broke windowsills in the wonderful evening”. Ariel would not have been written without The
Colossus. The latter paved the way for the next poetry collection of the American poet.
Sylvia Plath was obviously influenced by Theodor Roethke and Ted Hughes. It is important to compare
her poetry to these great poets’ works. The Colossus is an important book for people who are interested in
literature topics. As if a reader repeatedly wants to reread again. This book made Sylvia Plath one of the best
poets whose strong feminine voice is heard for many years.
 SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY COLLECTIONS “THE COLOSSUS” AND “ARIEL” 1249

A labour of love, and that labour lost.

The book title says a lot, a poet meets the expectation of the reader even with the title. Sylvia Plath’s mind
is dominated by grandiosity and continuity. She adores the nature and is afraid of it at the same time. The
hidden danger of her poetry makes humans stronger rather than causes joy. In the endless, fierce fight against
the rock cliffs, wind and sea, you can gain “temporary banal heroism“ as one can see in her poems “Point
Shirly” and “The Hermit at Outermost House” but eventually nature defeats humanity and wins.
A labour of love, and that labour lost.
Steadily the sea
Eats at Point Shirley? ( Plath, 1998, p. 56)

Landscapes altered by humans become unimportant and uninteresting for Sylvia Plath. She is attracted by
wild, uninhabited, intact nature. When feeling nostalgia for Cambridge, while walking in Grantchester Meadow,
she noticed that “Birds are like thumb fingers, swans are tamed, water rat feels funny when it feels inhospitality
of nature towards the humans.” For a poet the wind and the sea are those natural forces that can conquer
humanity or wait for them patiently before they become extinct and then take their place.
In the poem “Thin People” the danger comes from Sylvia herself, the poet perceives weak people as a
danger. She is afraid that “Their talent to persevere/ in thinness, to come, later,/ into our bad dreams”. The
poem “Mushroom” is an omen as a cancer spreading virus. In the poem “Sculptor” are shown the forms that the
sculptor should create soon, bodyless realities are felt, which are becoming not pieces of work but dwarfs.
His chisel bequeaths
Them life livelier than ours.
All The Dead Dears. (Plath, 1998, p. 78)

In the epigraph of the poem we read as a note: “In the Cambridge Archeology Museum, in a fourth century
stone coffin is put skull and bones of a mouse. A woman’s ankle bones are a bit gnarled”. This fact was the
source of inspiration for her poem:
These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
How they grip us through thick and thin,
There barnacle dead!
This lady here’s no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she’ll suck
Blood and whistle my marrow clean
To prove it… (Plath, 1998. p. 29)

Closeness that Sylvia feels towards any victim is not an expression of sympathy towards the stranger but
relative (close) feeling toward anything that exists and does not exist. However, omen dangerous mood is
constantly felt. For example, in the poem “Blue Moles” she expressed sympathy to the outsiders, outcasts. She
pays attention on that poem “Beggars”. One of the concepts that is felt in Sylvia Plath poems is annoyance
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1250 SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY COLLECTIONS “THE COLOSSUS” AND “ARIEL”

caused by the existence of the better world. In her early poems “Black Rook In Rainy Weather”, Plath describes
her talent half philosophically or half ironically. She is waiting not for a miracle but a little truth so that to make
everyday life more interesting.
To seize my sense, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutralit. (Plath, 1971. pp. 41-42)

Conclusion
The difference between the sensitivity of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath does not need underlining, there
are similarities—strong narrative skills, verbal exactness, coherence, usage of family stories unlimitedly with
allegory in poetry, but sensitivity in their poetry is essentially different. Ted Hughes is heroic and aggressive,
Sylvia is pensive and hesitant. Even their gods are different. Ted’s god is a tiger god, Sylvia Plath’s gods are
“not friendly gods, but shadow gods”. She denies other gods, only she can call them “Daddy”. With this
extremely religious words addressed to the gods, it is emptied from personal feelings, it is more related to
hallucinations and assumptions.

References
Alvarez, A. (1990). The Savage God. New York, London W.W. Norton & Company.
Axelrod, S. G. (1985). The mirror and the shadow: Plath’s poetics of self-doubt. Contemporary Literature, 26(3), 286-301.
Budick, E. M. (1987). The feminist discourse of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. College English, 49(8), 872-885.
Cam, H. (1987). “Daddy”: Sylvia Plath’s debt to Anne Sexton. American Literature, 59(3), 429-432.
Dickie, M. (1982). Sylvia Plath’s narrative strategies. The Iowa Review, 13(2), 1-14.
Fromm, H. (1990). Sylvia Plath, hunger artist. The Hudson Review, 43(2), 245-256.
Gilbert, S. M. (1979). Review: Contemporary poetry: Metaphors and morals. Contemporary Literature, 20(1), 116-123.
Libby, A. (1974). God’s lioness and the priest of Sycorax: Plath and Hughes. Contemporary Literature, 15(3), 386-405.
Perloff, M. G. (1973). On the road to Ariel: The “transitional” poetry of Sylvia Plath. The Iowa Review, 4(2), 94-110.
Plath, S. ( 1998). The Colossus and other poems. New York: Vintage International.
Plath, S. (2004). Ariel, Foreword by Frieda Hughes. Harperennial modernclassics.
Uroff, M. D. (1977). Sylvia Plath and confessional poetry: A reconsideration. The Iowa Review, 8(1), 104-115.
Wagner-Martin, L. (1984). Critical essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall & Company.