Dec 2003 - Feb 2004
Thought forum members might be interested in the following study day. All welcome!
SYLVIA PLATH: Collected Poems
ENGLISH LITERATURE SATURDAY DAY SCHOOL
Department of Continuing Education, University of Liverpool, 126 Mount Pleasant, Liverpool L69 3GR
Saturday, 27th March 2004, 9.30am - 4.30pm
Fee: £21 (£16 all concessions)
English Literature Saturdays provide the company and the context for an in-depth study of a particular author or work of literature. Whether the text in question is new or familiar to you, you will find the day challenging and stimulating. In preparation for the day school, you should read as widely as possible from the Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (ed. Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber). A list of poems for discussion on the day will be sent on enrolment.
For further information please telephone Joan Squires, course processor, on: 0151 794 2538
Joan Squires
Liverpool, UK
Saturday, February 28, 2004
According to the latest edition of the Radio Times (UK) a programme on BBC next Tuesday at 1900 called Homeground will be looking at the turbulence of the Plath/Hughes relationship in the light of the late film. Surprisingly it also claims to include exclusive & rare archive footage of both Plath & Hughes. This is either a mistake or a cataclysmic fact as I always thought that no footage of Plath had survived if it had even existed in the first place.
Does anyone have any more info re this?
Rehan Qayoom
London, UK
Saturday, February 28, 2004
Hi Doreen--I think, in part, that is exactly Hensher's argument, that Plath was more ambition than talent. For some reason, Ted's artistic vision, in Hensher's estimation, is more valid or valuable or worthy than Plath's, as if Hughes were a "grunge" (to steal a 90's musical term) poet, more interested in craft than in commercialism. What Hensher fails to address while damning Plath for her ambition, however, is the social construct of the day that made her so motivated. As a "poetess", rather than a poet, she had to jump through a lot more hoops than Hughes or any male writer of her day to get her work published.
Pamela
Boston, USA
Wesdnesday, February 25, 2004
I'm also writing in support of Anastasia from Australia's remarks. Well said, grrrl! Sylvia selflessly typed up Ted's poems, sent them out relentlessly, even rejoiced at his being published before she was, so it seems especially cruel that her poetry should be compared to his, and found wanting, merely because it is difference. I'm not suggesting that Ted owes his fame entirely to Sylvia, far from it. But while he is lauded for promoting her posthumous publication (which, of course, resulted in an income stream for him and his family) her contributoins to his body of work seemed to be forgotten, or dismissed by the Plath-haters. Brava, Anastasia.
Trish
Seattle, USA
Wesdnesday, February 25, 2004
Ciara, a nice topic. I find You're a fun and loving poem. The way the images build on and run into each other in a playful way is great.
Melanie Smith
Australia.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
What is everyone's favourite 'positive' Plath poem? I love Balloons.
Ciara
Monaghan,Ireland
Saturday, February 21 2004
I seem to remember, about the time Birthday Letters was published back in 1998, that one of the British papers ran several poems that weren't included in the collection and there was a particularly powerful one about Hughes encountering Plath's ghost.
Does anyone know of anywhere I could track these down again?
Claire Smythe
Canada
Saturday, February 21 2004
I am writing in support and agreement with Anastasia, from Australia about her piece on "Philip Hensher's pro-Hughes article". I fully agree with her use of the word idiotic. Yes Plath was more famous for being the wife of the poet Ted Hughes than for being a poet and novelist in her own right. Yet i dont think people like philip realise that her ambition and dedication and determination to succeed as a writer was greater than his every was.
Doreen
Offaly, Ireland
Saturday, February 21 2004
I just want you guys to know there's a play based on The Bell Jar playing now in Montreal, Quebec. It's getting rave reviews.
Frederic
Vancouver, Canada
Friday, February 20 2004
For the time being, I'd simply like to express Plathological disgust for "Philip Hensher." Such an uncomprehending, ignorant & sexist article has been approvingly and/or indifferently re~printed all around the world, as if it offers up some kind of rational "verdict" on Sylvia Plath for the masses.
I hope a lot of other "adolescents", "feminists", "women writers" and "Plath fanatics" are whinging loudly over that article! It was idiotic. Not only was it rather contemptuous towards Plath herself, it seemed to be saying "Be British (Like Ted)!", defend "our" poet laureate. There was a curious undertone of national pride; but Hensher's own inward, fanciful emotions got the better of him. I thought.
Anastasia
Garden Grove, Australia
Wednesday, February 18 2004
I am currently working on a project on Plath. I would like to find info. on crticism and interpetations of the poem "The Rival". If anyone can help me out, post it on this page. Thanks.
Alexis
New Orleans, USA
Monday, February 16, 2004
I feel I should write something in rememberance but perhaps words in this case would be an insult to the writer.
Ciara
Monaghan, Ireland
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Has anyone seen "Voices & Visions: Sylvia Plath"? One women (a literary critic I believe) talks about Sylvia feeling torn in one particular poem between being a good/studious girl or a more trendy/cool girl. I can't recall the name. If you know what I'm talking about please email or post the poem's title. Thanks.
Stefania
Mass, USA
Wednessday, February 11, 2004
Anyone interested in some very good lit crit should go and read the newly published critical study (not too lengthy, but very thoughtful and compelling) on Plath's Ariel. James Reich has published this for the anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death, and I think it's a great read. I think the thesis is particularly good but I won't say what it is here...
Hannah Levbarg
Bath, UK
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
I was recently introduced to the work of Sylvia Plath, and was so enthralled with her writing that I decided to do my junior year research paper on The Bell Jar. I am a blind student, and so working with hard copy print resources is slightly harder than would normally be thought. Even so, what with the plethora of books written about her and her life, coming across actual books proved to be no problem.
However, I have to have these materials scanned and turned into Braille, so in the meantime, I would like to focus on internet or computer accessible resources. I am finding that such resources are rather scarce. Most of the articles I am finding focus mainly on S.P.'s life, or her poetry. I need to find articles pertaining to solely or with the majority of emphasis placed on her novel. If anyone could direct me in any direction, be it website, database, or whatnot, where such material could be obtained, I'd gratefully appreciate it. Please don't think this is a plea for someone to do my research for me, as I have exhausted every resource available to me in order to find materials. Thanks much for any help given.
Laura
Allentown, USA
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
I would like to post this quote from Letters Home as a tribute to Plath, on the anniversary of her death. However, it is not her death that I am so much interested in as her life, and I wanted to remember the relationship that she had with Ted Hughes, both in life and in literature. They loved each other, of course, but I find it is their faith in each others' writing that is inspiring, that two people from different countries and backgrounds could meet and recognize something in each other is tremendous, and worth remembering. (Of course this happens all the time between readers and books, but for it to happen between two writers is even more special, I feel.)
"For the first time in my life, mother, I am at peace...I feel that all my life, all my pain and work has been for this one thing. All the blood spilt, all the words written, the people loved, have been a work to fit me for loving...I see the power and voice in him that will shake the world alive. Even as he sees into my poems and will work with me to make me a woman poet like the world will gape at; even as he sees into my character and will tolerate no fallings away from my best right self." - May 3, 1956
Lena
Toronto, Canada
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Katie -- the poem you are referring to is called "Three Women," and it is in Winter Trees (to name just one book). Enjoy!
JB
Cambridge, USA
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
I have always loved Sylvia Plath's novel, and have begun to look more closely into her poetry. I had no idea she had written so many, and was so diverse! However, I am having trouble interpreting "The Disquieting Muses." I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions regarding the meaning of the poem. I would really appreciate the help. Thanks!!
Sarah Waters
London, UK
Sunday, February 8, 2004
I've been searching for a line that I heard was from one of Sylvia Plath's poems that goes something like "It's as if I tore out my heart??, put a smile on my face and walked out into the world...?" Something along those lines. Does it sound familiar? I would love if someone could tell me which poem that comes from. Thanks very much!
Katie Coggins
College Station, TX, USA
Saturday, February 7, 2004
My oversight, Pippo. I didn't see Hensher's name the first two times I read the article, as I was looking for it at the article's end. My anger over its content intervened. I don't think it's a stretch, however, for Anja (as I did) to assume from the sexist remarks that the author is male, as indeed he is.
I think what Hensher is arguing, and I agree, is that the work should be judged for its artistic value, irregardless of the author's personal life. (I disagree that it's only Plath's personal life that gives value to her poems.) Unavoidably, biographical details do change the perspective we bring to the page and how we read a poem (or story or painting). How differently would we read/judge Birthday Letters, for example, if we were not familiar with the history that engenders them? Agreeing or disagreeing with Plath's or Hughes's life choices, ideally, should not interfere with an appreciation of the art.
Hensher comments that Hughes's personal life does not lend itself to movie muckraking. According to Diane Middlebrook's recent book, Her Husband (how Hensher must deplore that title, too), fishing wasn't Hughes's only hobby. There's plenty of "dirt" in Hughes's life that, by Hollywood standards, could be turned to mud. I'm sure given time, someone will fail to do justice to Hughes's work/life, too.
Pamela
Boston, USA
Friday, February 6, 2004
I am a Plath fan, and chose her work as an option in one of my majors. Having said this, I think the Telegraph article is extremely interesting, and there is some truth in some of the points the writer raises. Reading the Telegraph article has reminded me of the importance of keeping an open and independent mindset. Five years after graduating, I don't feel the same level of interest in Plath as I felt before, and I wonder whether perhaps her poetry first appealed to me so strongly because I read it as a teenager and because it seemed to mirror the turbulence of my own feelings.
Although I am sure few people on this forum would want to acknowledge it, in committing suicide Plath did gain iconic status. Like Kurt Cobain more recently, the morbid appeal of her death may have resulted in more of a spotlight being shone on, and hence more recognition for, her work. Ted Hughes also became enormously unpopular after Sylvia's death, and his womanizing and inability to remain faithful to either Sylvia or Assia are well documented. Perhaps the fact that he was so easy to dislike on a personal level, and the fact that most Plath fans would sympathise with her against him, also automatically bias us against his work in comparison with Sylvia's.
Additionally, Sylvia's work does have shock appeal through the sheer force of the language and imagery she uses, which possibly makes it more compelling reading than descriptions of hawks in the rain, jaguars in cages etc.
I imagine I will be attacked for saying this, since I notice nobody seems to share my opinion. My point is that the arguments the Telegraph writer made should be considered rationally and independently to our own admiration (or not) of Plath's work.
Samantha
London, UK
Thursday, February 5, 2004
If the last journal does exist- would the public actually see it? I believe that Frieda has the rights to her parents' work & she has been very private.
Stefania
Mass, USA
Thursday, February 5, 2004
Elaine, thank you for posting the link to old discussions. I noticed a poster there asked if anyone had seen the 1980s film version of "The Bell Jar." I did see it; I thought it was extremely poor, an embarassment to watch. As many of you know, Esther's roommate was gay; Sylvia's roommate was not. A lawsuit was filed, and apparently Ted Hughes attended every day of the trial. Also, critics generally savaged the movie. I recall one reviewer said that Esther's breakdown prior to her suicide attempt had all the pathos of a cheerleader whose team had just lost the big game.
Trish
Seattle, USA
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
It's a bit unfair to criticise the writer of the Telegraph article for being 'anonymous' or 'a coward' or 'probably a man' as his name is clearly printed in the stand-first, which is reproduced in the strand below (he's called Philip Hensher). The Telegraph, like most British newspapers (and, I imagine, most American papers), does not tend to publish anonymous articles on the arts.
Pippo Tomassi
London, UK
Tuesday, February 4, 2004
Yes, there is much to bemoan in the Telegraph article. I wonder, too, at this phrasing: ìand in a disgusting way, she started to bring suicide into the question of artistic merit.î I wish the author would clarify what he or she means by the sloppy wording ìin a disgusting way.î Moreover, I think the anonymous author (coward) is misreading Plathís journal entry. Plath questions Why these brilliant women succumbed in the end? Why wasnít their art enough? Not, why a woman needs to ìresortî to suicide to ìbecomeî an artist. How high, Plath asks, must she set her goals to succeed as an artist, not as a suicide.
Pamela
Boston, USA
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Sylvia Plath was a person who never got the understanding and patience that perhaps Viginia Woolf did. It seems evident from Birthday Letters by Hughes that he very much regretted he could not have done more for her, but his own inadequacies got in the way of his love for her. This new film released on January 30th 2004 does nothing but try to glamorise the most painful times of her life and fails to show anyone, especially those newcomers, who are trying to find out what her personal and deeper turmoil was and how it effected her work. Concentrating too much on her tragic suicide just enforces that romantic Shelley-like notion of poets killing themselves. She was and is a great poet and little has been done to try to understand her person, which was a true poet through and through.
Ravi
Birmingham, UK
Friday, January 30, 2004
After a quick and rather angered reading of the article (kindly sent by Pamela) in the Telegraph about who was better, Sylvia or Ted, I cannot help but making a few comments. First of all I would like to ask the author a few questions. It's such a pity that he would probably never set an eye in this Forum, he would perhaps understand things a bit.
First question:
Do you really believe the outside world is the way men writers describe it? Are they really that objective? I assume they do not filter it through their emotions. Are you sure?
Second question:
Why poems about animals, and the outside world in general, turn their authors into better poets?
Third question:
You call Plath's poems hermetic and rootless, making only sense in the context of the life of her creator, whereas Hugues's remains always accesible through their roots in the English soul and English literature. Being a foreigner myself, I would like to know if you think that is the reason why Plath's poems have always touched me more directly than Hugues's?
And last question:
Why is it better to watch at one's inner drama as one watches sparrows? Because of its scientific interest?
If I could add something else I would ask this writer, or journalist, or critic, if he could explain to me what exactly he means by saying that Hugues is intractable and that is a guarantee of his greatness. Why? Has it something to do with the idea that reducing a man to stereoptypes is more difficult?
Mai
Madrid, Spain
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
My name is Nathan Curry and I work in the marketing department at the Kings Head Theatre in Islington. We are currently promoting a show called the The Edge; based on the life of Sylvia Plath. The show has just come from Broadway- where it has had immense success. We are looking to offer a reduced rate of ticket to Sylvia Plath fans.
The Kings Head Theatre in Islington is proud to present Edge; a one woman show surrounding the life and death of Sylvia Plath and starring Angelica Torn. An imagined reconstruction of her final hours hours, Edge is a brilliant new play by Amercian playwright and academic, Paul Alexander. A smash hit off-Broadway, where it garnered rave reviews for author and performer, this is theatrical dynamite.
"A resurrected Sylvia Plath. Showcase of a lifetime." New York Times
The Kings Head is pleased to offer the women's groups of London an exclusive offer, all tickets for the week of 3rd February to Sunday the 8th February are available at the discounted price of £12.50 each. Call the box office on 0207 226 1916 and quote the pass word: ëPoetry Groupí to reserve your ticket.
Nathan Curry
London, UK
Monday, January 26, 2004
The subject of whether Hughes or Plath was the better poet was discussed some years ago on the Forum. Anyone who would like to read more on this debate should go to 9th. June 1998 in the archives.
Elaine Connell
Hebden Bridge, UK
Monday, January 26, 2004
That guy (it must be a man) who wrote the Telegraph article has not only not understood Plath's poetry, he has failed to understand Hughes' poetry either. If he thinks that when Hughes writes about a jaguar, a pike or even a flower, he is being a naturalistic observer of his surroundings, he could not be more mistaken. I wonder if Hughes is so popular in England only because people misunderstand him? Take his book Flowers and Insects, for example, very innocent looking, with colour illustrations by L. Baskin, those poems are just as much about his inner world, his anguish and joy, as they are about the flowers and insects he seems to be writing about. They would be only half as exciting if they weren't. But the Telegraph doesn't even print the name of whoever wrote the article, so no debate is desired there, I guess.
Anja Beckmann
Leipzig, Germany
Monday, January 26, 2004
You're not alone in having such a reaction to hearing Plath read her own poetry, Erica. Whenever I have taught her work and played tapes of her reading "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" in particular I have had someone in the group who has had a visceral reaction to them. In a couple of cases people have fled the room in tears. Sometimes I have become worried by reading and discussing such powerful material with young people. But responses like these are a testament to the power of Plath's poetry.
Elaine Connell
Hebden Bridge, UK
Monday, January 26, 2004
I must share this with someone because it may help calm my nerves and thus scare away the chill which is climbing my spine. I just finished listening to "Lady Lazurus" on audio. I have never been so scared in my life. The first poem I ever read from Syliva Plath was "The Applicant" which I did not fully understand, and still believe is mostly a waste of words. At times, Plath was unable to express her intense emotion coherently in words. However, when I read "Mystic" I was for lack of a better word.. mystified. It was probing, intense, chilling..moving!!! I immediately consumed as much as possible about Plath and have since then. Now, I'm sitting here and she just spoke to me. Her pain, her depression, her life... she told me all in one poem. With her voice. It as if she had never died. I feel so cold.
Erica Jean Keating
Earlton, USA
Monday, January 26, 2004
Thank you, Pamela. Wow, yet another sexist view of Sylvia Plath's work. Why must her work be compared to his and found wanting, simply because it was different? The writer argues that because hers deals with the interior world, it is inferoir. Ted Hughes's poems, taken up with the exterior world, must therefore be superior. Tired faulty comparisons. Thanks for sending it, though.
Trish
Seattle, USA
Monday, January 26, 2004
Yet another article relegating Plath, and if I read between the lines, women writers in general (those secondary writers who prefer "to write about the outside world through the filter of [their] own emotions") to the sidelines. It's available online with the Telegraph. I'm not sure if the direct link will bring you to the page if you're not a subscriber, so I've pasted in the text in full:
Ted or Sylvia: who was better? (Filed: 20/01/2004)
In the film of Sylvia Plath's life, Ted Hughes is reduced to the role of supporting player. Yet, says Philip Hensher, her poems merely dramatised her inner traumas, while his were the work of a wonderful observer of the world.
The title of the new movie about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was originally announced as Sylvia and Ted. Now that it's about to be released, a small change has been made. It's now called simply Sylvia. One of the greatest poets of the 20th century has, apparently, been reduced to a supporting role in a movie about his first wife.
Much as that is to be deplored, the filmmakers have a point. You couldn't make a blockbuster about Ted Hughes's life and work; you would have to leave out a hell of a lot of fishing, for a start. On the other hand, Sylvia Plath's short career makes the perfect weepy. That, actually, is what is wrong with her work, and what is right about his.
Plath's story has been told so many times, and it is so horrible a story, that no sane person could wish to sit through it again. The repulsive fact is that she was the first person to tell it, and she told it from beginning to end, culminating in a poem about a dead, "perfected" woman, written very shortly before she committed suicide. Plath was a brilliant student, successful in almost everything she turned her hand to, a winner of prizes and a collector of top grades.
From her journals, it is pretty clear that she saw no reason, or pretended to see no reason, why the challenge of turning herself into a Top Poet was any different from any other challenge. "I am lucky: I am at Smith because I wanted it and worked for it. I am going to be a Guest Editor on Mlle in June because I wanted it and worked for it. I am being published in Harper's because I wanted it and worked for it."
The problem was, as Ted Hughes wrote much later, that she had difficulty getting futher than her general desire to be a poet. She wanted to write, but "Write what?/Your heart, mid-Sahara, raged/In its emptiness./Your dreams were empty."
The early poems are baroque, elegantly turned lyrics about nothing very much, and the journals are full of bizarre exercises in assumed styles. Some of the descriptions of Spanish villages might be the work of Alan Whicker.
The solution she came to was to turn to the deepest unconscious and start dramatising the most horrible psychological traumas. They are intensely powerful poems, but it is hard not to think that, in poems such as Daddy or Lady Lazarus, she talked herself into the state of emotional extremity she wanted to dramatise.
Like many women writers, she preferred to write about the outside world through the filter of her own emotions - "When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world."
The reader often has the uncomfortable feeling, in those poems about the horror of beekeeping, say, or when she decided to turn her benign entomologist father, Otto, into a Nazi, that there is a gleeful irresponsibility at work here.
It was an irresponsibility towards herself, too, and, in a disgusting way, she started to bring suicide into the question of artistic merit: "Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Or Sara Teasdale - or the other brilliant women - neurotic? If only I knew how high I could set my goals, my requirements for my life." However good she became - and those late poems are brilliant, no doubt - she worked great damage. They are not poems to live with.
Ted Hughes did not commit suicide, and his life did not go towards making a movie; it went towards what was published last year, a glorious and fecund Collected Poems. From the beginning, Hughes was a very different poet from Plath. There is never any sense, as there is even in the best of Plath, of a literary style being tried on provisionally; he never reminds you of anyone but himself.
The biggest difference, and the quality that turns him into a great poet, is that he was quite simply interested in the outside world. He is a wonderful observer, and his poems rarely choose to filter what he sees through small private emotions. His early animal poems see just a jaguar in a cage, a pike, a hawk, a hunting sparrow, transforming them into myth or symbol, but never reducing them to puppets in a private trauma.
That quality never left him, though he did find ways to talk about private anguish that are as compelling and painful as anything in Plath. Crowis a weird, ugly fable of sexual cruelty, played out by cartoon-like figures; Gaudete is a bizarre and baffling fantasy about damnation and gnosticism, rising from some private pain but going well beyond that.
But Hughes's inventions, even at their most private, remain accessible through their roots in the English soul and English literature. Crow, bizarre as it is, looks like a sort of 20th-century In Memoriam. By comparison, Plath is wilfully hermetic and rootless, making sense only in the context of the life of their creator. Her last poems attempt to create a kind of celebrity psyche.
One you grow into; the other you turn away from. Even in the most personal of his books, Birthday Letters, Hughes remains a rational observer, watching the drama as he used to watch sparrows, never turning inwards.
Of course, Plath died terribly young, and she might have learned to control her all-devouring talent. As it is, if you place Plath's collected poetry next to Hughes's, what emerges is the contrast between two quite different things.
Plath seems like a brilliant prodigy, an extraordinary and tragic freak, like Trakl or Rimbaud; Hughes, in the way his work changes direction, renews itself, grows organically into new and inexhaustible forms, seems like a worthy successor to the greatest of English poets.
Plath's work seems like a story with no subtext; Hughes's looks like Tennyson's, a story too complex and rich to be reduced to a weepy narrative. He is intractable, and that, in a way, is a guarantee of his greatness.
Pamela
Boston, USA
Friday, January 23, 2004
I thought there may be interest in the new issue of Ink - a UK based book magazine that has a feature on Sylvia and the new film.
Sam Jones
Epsom, UK
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Any ideas where I may find a transcipt of Plath's study on the double personality in Dostoevsky? ('Magic Mirror:..")Would it be worth petitioning the Lilly Library, to make such transcripts available to the general public? (For instance, on-line?)
William
Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
To Alys: Regarding the poem "Her Husband" - this was included in Wodwo and can also be found in the recently published Collected Poems of Ted Hughes. There is no indication whatsover that this poem refers to his marriage to Plath, it is set in a working class family (I am thinking of coal miners) and has a coal-dusted husband coming home from work, being miserable and making his wife miserable by demonstrating how hard he has to work for the money she is spending. The poem shows compassion for the wife without exposing the husband as cruel, because he is caught in his circumstances and might be different if chance had given him a different life. It might reflect on familiar scenes from his native Yorkshire but most certainly not his own parents. He seems to be writing in the tradition of D.H. Lawrence here, maybe.
Anyway, in my opinion this poem has nothing to do with Plath and why anyone wrote it on a calendar with her death date is a minor mystery, I believe. Might even have been faked by somebody to try and sell it as an original autograph.
Anja Beckmann
Leipzig, Germany
Monday, January 19, 2004
Sarah Jones, on Tuesday, February 4, 1999, had written on this forum:
"I have come across a curiosity that I hope someone out there can help me with: The poem: "Her Husband" written in longhand on the back of a calender dated 11th Feb '63. I need not remind anyone of the significance of that date.I've checked, and it would seem not to have been written in Hughes' hand. But where did it come from? The poem had been published only twice, both in magazines: The Spectator and Harpers(both in 1961). Obviously, the find isn't as important as I'd hoped. But I'm still intrigued. The calender was headed: Wadcrete (Building Supplies) Ltd, Croydon, Surrey (England). Is there anyone out there who can throw some light on this?"
and on the 9th:"Thanks to all for your interest re:"Her Husband". I was unable to reply because my machine crashed and I lost addresses. The most common question was who wrote it? Answer: Hughes in or around 1960. I find it quite awesome and suggest you look it up in his biblio. It's an utter mystery to me as to who on earth wrote it down on the back of a calender dated 11.02.63. I feel that if it really isn't Hughes' writing it must have been someone very close to them. Has anyone any idea whether they had any links to Croydon, England? Any suggestions at all will be gratefully received."
But since that date nobody has ever answered or talked about it anymore. On the contrary, I find this simply mysterious and intriguing, and curious. Could it be possible to keep on dealine with this topic from Sarah Jones?
Alys
Rome, Italy
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
BJ, I have an old cassette of Sylvia reading a number of her poems, entitled Syvia Plath Reads Her Own Poetry or something similar. More than that, I can't tell you. I copied it off a cassette from my local library some years ago. But, just so you know such an item exists!
Emily
Melbourne, Autralia
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Regarding Ted Hughes's mysterious locked trunk, here is the exact quote that I found in Middlebrook's Her Husband.On page 270, she is describing Hughes's archiving of his literary papers, preparatory to leaving Court Green: "...108,000 items in 86 boxes...plus material sealed in a trunk that is not to be opened until the year 2023."
Interesting, too, is Middlebrook's description of how Hughes abruptly canceled plans for Ann Skea to come to Court Green from Australia, for the purpose of cataloging the work. (page 269): "...There was a note of panic in his tense message...his shock at a casual sampling of the collection." Middlebrook speculates that Hughes felt he alone should have a look at the stuff.
Now, unless Hughes was shamelessly pandering to posterity, which I doubt, those are some very startling documents, indeed, that await us. The trunk just might include Sylvia's last, lost journal.
Trish
Seattle, USA
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
OK - here is the passage from Her Husband, by Diane Middlebrook, that mentions the journals:
Is it possible that Ted Hughes did not destroy or lose the journals? Reasonable people have always doubted Hughes's claims that they were missing, and tantalizing evidence that at least one of them still exists has now turned up in his archives. In the draft of a long letter to the literary scholar Jacqueline Rose in 19909, Hughes initiated a confession; "I have never told this to anyone - I hid the last journal - about 2 months of entries," a decision he now regarded as an expression of his "utter foolishness" at the time he did it. He says that only the last page might have proved damaging to their children; he was actually protecting "someone else," whom he doesn't name. But even while drafting this disclosure, Hughes had second thoughts, and crossed out those self-incriminating words. He sent Jacqueline Rose a much less interesting - though still very interesting - letter. But he saved the evidence of his impulse to tell all. The whole slew of draft pages of the unsent letter went into his archive, fragments of the 2 1/2-ton jigsaw puzzle he left to posterity. (from p. 238)
Alison Matthews
Okemos, USA
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
I wonder why Anne Sexton is virtually forgotten while Sylvia Plath has become the best known poet in the country? I would think that readers who like Sylvia Plath would also devour Anne Sexton's work. They knew each other and Anne Sexton is just as much a tragic figure as Plath . Sexton's biography makes for fascinating reading. She was more of a "mad poet" than Sylvia to the extent that readers may have lost confidence in the qulity of her work. Anyway, I've collected 10 books on Anne Sexton and wish Hollywood would do a movie about her. I do prefer Sylvia Plath. Of course, neither is a god like Arthur Rimbaud.
By the way, you can pre-order the Sylvia DVD on Amazon now!
Robert Robbins
Williamsport, PA, USA
Sunday, January 11, 2004
I have just discovered this forum last night and I read the whole page through about seven times. In reply to the "anti-cultists" I would like to say that Sylvia Plath could have done anything --- robbed ten banks, murdered the roster of the Baltimore Orioles, killed herself eighteen more times --- and it wouldn't have mattered because she was such a great writer. I wonder why so many famous people kill themselves... perhaps a tiny percentage wanted a cult. However, it's not fair that Sylvia Plath is being dismissed as a fad just because she took her own life.
In response to Peter K. Steinberg in Boston, I'm a big Kurt Cobain fan and I think Kurt and Sylvia have the same problem: they are popular because of their death, and their talent is overlooked. My father has called both Kurt and Sylvia losers, and said nothing about their great contributions to their respective fields. Both Sylvia and Kurt left something behind that is now being interpreted in only one way... but which could have meanings on many different levels.
Of course, if Plath hadn't committed suicide I might not have ever heard of her, (because her suicide did make her much more popular) and I might have lived my whole life without once being exposed to her brilliant writing... and that would be terrible.
Robin
Bethesda, USA
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Just wanted to know if anyone would be wonderful enough to discuss the themese in "Nick and the Candlestick" with me - I'm not looking for anyone to write my essay for me :-) just some helpful discussion on the main themes and discuss any points I may have missed or any you may think I need to not include! Many thanks and I look forward to talking to you!
Lorraine
Plymouth, UK
Friday, January 9, 2004
In class today, one of my students looked reflective after we had been reading "Lesbos". I happened to catch up with him later and asked if all was okay. He replied that, on finishing the reading he had simply wanted to think and to smile, and that he had felt a connection. Having taught poetry for nearly twenty years to High School students such a comment staggered me to the extent that I wanted I am still considering it several hours later, and as a result I have happened across this forum.
So ... I thought I would pick the communal minds and see what is thrown up. Plath's development as a poet is not so much about subject matter and versification but about sound, or what I refer to as the music of her poetry: there is a definite shift from poems that were essentially exercises in the written form, to poems that were meant to be read aloud. I am fortunate to have a tape of three readings Plath performed for the BBC - "Lady Lazarus", "Daddy" and "Fever 103*" - but are there any more?
BJ
Manchester, UK
Wednesday, January 7, 2004
Start saving your money now. The DVD for the film Sylvia will be released in the US of A on 10 February 2004. Also, Edward Butscher's biography on Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, the first to appear back in th 1970s, is scheduled to be re-released in February as well. I'm not certain if it will have any new information, though. It's comparatively dated when matched up with more recent books, and features fake names to save the anonymity of players in the Plath game, such as Richard S---- for Richard Sassoon, Dr Ruth Jones for Dr Ruth Beuscher and the Willard Family for the Norton Family. Maybe these names will be fixed for this edition -- it makes reading the book very difficult -- since that can of worms was opened a while ago.
Peter K Steinberg
Boston, USA
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
I've found the exact page of the book Her Husband in which Middlebrook speaks about the poem Daddy: page no 187. I quote some passages from it:
"But Plath wasn't addressing these urgent words to her actual father, Otto Plath, though the poem is charged with feelings about him. And though she wrote the poem the day after Ted Hughes moved out of Cout Green, apparently abandoning his own role as father, she wasn't writing about him, either. No, she was saying good riddance to the attitude behind all those poems she had written in which fathers appear larger then life." At page 188 Middlebrook says: "Plath's powerful fantasies about her father provide some highoctane fuel in the poem, but Daddy is about more then that. It's about a girl's collusion with a man's sense of entitlement to be in charge of her."
I think that Middlebrook doesn't completely reject the autobiographical source of the poem, but she also tries to detect other deeper and wider meanings lying under it. For example the common situation of women in the fifties and early sixties of forced dependence on male figures, thei inability to be really free and themselves.
Chiara
Milan, Italy
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
About Plath's missing journal...on page 15 of Elaine Feinstein's biography of Ted Hughes, she writes: "It was Assia who found and read Sylvia's journal of the last months of her life, according to Suzette Macedo, and was overwhelmed by the spite and malice directed towards herself there. This may have been a factor in Ted's decision to destroy the journal."
To me, though, this suggests, more than anything, that it was perhaps Assia Wevill herself who destroyed it. Just an idea; but let's hope that it's still out there. There is no literary document I more long to see...for if Plath's last journal chronicled her suffering as Ariel did, or contained some of the seeds of Ariel, or could be read as a companion to Ariel, then its loss to literature (as Alvarez said in a broader context) is indeed inestimable.
Lisa A. Flowers
Norfolk, USA
Friday, January 2, 2004
Trish, my understanding of the line "You stand at the blackboard, Daddy" is a reference to a picture that Plath had of her father--standing at his classroom's blackboard. Don't know if this will help you decipher anything, but I thought I'd chirp in. :)
Bridget
Columbus, USA
Sunday, December 28, 2003
This is in response to Trish's message of 12/18 re Middlebrook's assessment of "Daddy" as not being based on either Ted Hughes or Otto Plath:
I haven't read Middlebrook's Her Husband, so don't know quite what she said. But just offhand, Middlebrook came of age when the literary world was very much influenced by the "New Criticism," which espoused that an author's biographical background was to be steadfastly discounted in favor of Nothing But the words. And post-New Crit, the "Confessional" label was often flung about to too-easily dismiss works by Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Lowell, et al. So my immediate thought is that Middlebrook is probably rather knee-jerkingly defending Plath against Ye Olde Tyme criticisms of Plath's work.
I don't see how a serious reader of Plath can not recognize the biographical parallels between the poem and Plath's own experiences, though. The "gray toe" a reference to the toe the diabetic Otto stubbed which led to the leg amputation and his eventual death; the confusion about Otto's actual roots (in territory claimed by both Poland and Germany); the blackboard image (as you mentioned); the ages of the narrator--10 (buried daddy), 20 (tried to kill self), 30 (writing the poem)--are slightly off, but close enough to actual biographical facts; her husband Ted was known for wearing black and she had been married to him for 7 years, as the poem states; there was an incident where Plath tore a phone from a wall ("the black telephone's off at the root")...
Again, I don't know what exactly Middlebrook wrote, but I do think that Plath uses personal details here as a starting point to proclaiming her independence from such stifling influences. That's the cool, stunning thing about Plath's writing: She uses the personal, but also simultaneously transcends it and forges a larger meaning.
Cassandra
San Francisco, USA
Sunday, December 28, 2003
I'd like help from some of your Plathophiles, please, with the Daddy poem. I loaned out Her Husband so I can't quote preicsely what Diana Middlebrook says about it, but I remember she characterizes it as SP in the process of rejecting her own reliance on 'Daddy' figures to rescue her. Middlebrook rejects the idea that it is a reflection of either Ted Hughes or Otto Plath or a composite of the two...
Though she is a scholar and I am not, I can't say that I agree with her. The reference to "you stand at the blackboard, Daddy" is too vivid to be a generalized 'daddy figure'. I think it is aimed squarely at those two individuals. I know this poem has been endlessly over analyzed, and that's it's been discussed on this site, but I don't think I've seen anyone characterize it quite the way Middlebrook has (an author whom I respect very much, BTW!). She expressed great admiration for the poem, but is is Middlebrook trying to take the sting out of it? Is she too much enamored of her subject, Ted Hughes? I wonder....
Trish
Seattle, USA
Thursday, December 18, 2003
Yes, Alison, please dig up your copy and nail that quote down exactly for us, for if you have it exact then that is something very interesting...? What page is it?
Kenneth Jones
Berkeley, USA
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
For those who have read Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband, the Readerville site is having an organized discussion of it beginning Jan. 15th. You have to register to participate, but registration is free, and they don't send your info anywhere.
Amy Rea
Eden Prairie, USA
Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Bravo, Mai!--and thanks, Trish!
Kenneth Jones
Berkeley, USA
Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Kenneth has a good point about the cults that surround people who die young. Probably one of the best illustrations of that would be the attention paid to the death of Princess Diana as composed to the death of Mother Teresa a week later. Di is still making headlines, six years later, but I haven't read a whole lot about Mother Teresa lately
.Amy Rea
Eden Prairie, USA
Friday, December 12, 2003
Alison, interesting that you have found this information about Plath's last journal. I have always doubted that Hughes really did burn it. There is evidence that he saved all sorts of scraps of paper of both his own and other writers' work so it always seemed out of character to me that he would destroy such an important piece of literary history. I wonder when and if it will be made public?
Elaine Connell
Hebden Bridge, UK
Friday, December 12, 2003
The word "cult" is used as a pejorative in this discussion, but it need not be taken as such. Literary personages or intellectual notions that have been deemed "fads" contemporaneously have been known to enter the canon, becoming part of a culture's literary tradition. Devotees of the Plath "cult" (the existence of which sites like this are surely evidence thereof) see her as just such a personage and her work as Literature (with a capital L). The fact that many comtemporary literary critics have been forced year after year since the 1960s to deal with the "Plath cult" by dismissing Plath as a "minor" poet and her readers as (a)rabid feminists; (b)depressives; and (c)perennial adolescents should merely assure her fans that literary critics of the twenty-first century (or twenty-second, or twenty-third) will hit on to what all of us here already know.
Melissa Dobson
Bristol RI, USA
Thursday, December 11, 2003
In the book Her Husband it is mentioned that the Hughes archives include drafts of letters Hughes wrote to someone mentioning "something he has never told anyone," that he hid Plath's last journal, did not burn or lose it. I don't have the book with me now so am only paraphrasing, but it's very interesting. I suspect if it's true, that the journal is in the box that isn't to be opened for many years.
Alison Matthews
Okemos, USA
Thursday, December 11, 2003
I don't mind being labelled as a feminist, a Plathian, a Plath fanatic, a resentful woman, a bipolar, a manic depressive, someone with personality disorders or even a peanut eater. Labels are not important after all. I have been interested in Sylvia Plath as a poet and as a woman ever since I first read her and about her. A lot more people have experienced similar feelings. Her influence is undeniable. What is important is not whether teenagers and depressive readers are attracted towards her poetry or her life. What is important is why there are so many women who identify themselves with her and so many men who understand why.
Mai
Madrid, Spain
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Rehan Quayoom and Kenneth Jones...great posts. Kenneth, I loved your articulation about the absence of feminine 'nice-ness' in Plath's poetry. Exactly, exactly, exactly! I've always been mesmerized by her daring in that regard, and never seen it articulated so well, anywhere. Send us more like that, please!
Trish
Seattle, USA
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
I think the main reason that Hemingway's imitators are not taken as a suicicdal cult is because Hemingway's writings aren't riddled with hints and often blatant addresses to suicidal thoughts and obsessions, as are Plath's. This doesn't mean, of course, that I am condoning any sort of generalization of those who enjoy and love Plath's work; I love it myself. However, I think Plath's work has such an intense and cathartic mean that Plath's work was the sole cause. It's very, very likely (almost certain) that there is a number of un-related stimuli involved.
There is no justice in identifying Plath's fans as a suicide-obsessed cult who can do nothing for themselves, so they absorb everything Plath is in order to find a sense of self. That is rubbish.
Benjamin Ruppert
Winston, USA
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Kelly, I think you mean the diary which wasn't supposed to be released until the 50th anniversary but it was included in the last publication of Plath's journals. There is also the journal Hughes claims to have lost and the one he claims to have burnt.
Both of these admissions seem criminal to me. It wasn't his place to destroy her work, if he felt that strongly about her personal feelings being publicised then why release the other journals? If he couldn't bear to have them read he should have refused but publish them.
It shows lack of respect for her and her talents. Unless of course he lies. Wouldn't you love to be the person to find these two diaries?
Ciara
Monaghan, Ireland
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Well--the Psychology Today article had it right; Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse, and you too will become a Cult, in whatever field; James Dean, Kurt Cobain, the Buckleys Tim and Jeff, Marilyn Monroe, Buddy Holly, Shelley, Keats, Isadora, Jim Morrison, Hendrix, Janis, whoever. Whether your cult survives, will depend on the quality of the work you did beforehand. People mourn the loss of a young, pretty face, not an old weathered one. One has a peculiar tang, the other is only what is to be expected. One is unjust, the other, just.
Kenneth Jones
Berkeley, USA
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
One hopes that Sylvia Plath is on reading lists because of the quality of her writing and not because of the existence of 'cult' followers. The fascination people find in her life grows out of the brilliance of her work. That's the reason she is treated as a serious artist. Without the poems, it's just a sad sordid story. Her poems are not for everybody, and it's easy to exaggerate her popularity, but forty years after her death, she continues to attract new admirers. This year we have seen plays, novels, a movie, and more books on Plath, all aimed at a broad audiance. There doesn't seem to be much agreement on anything, which probably means people will be writing and talking about her for years to come. I personally have never found her poems morbid, but other people find other things. Why should interest in her be characterized as a 'cult' to begin with? The fact that there might be some young women and even some men who are attracted to her for unhealthy reasons is unfortunate but it has nothing to do with Plath's status as a poet.
Paul Snyder
New York City, USA
Tuesday, December 9, 2003
Ciara, you are allowed to appreciate Sylvia Plath as a poet, and I think the notion of a Plath cult has been very much overblown in the media, which loves to paint a simplistic view of young women. It is patronizing, and it is just plain wrong. It's been many years since I was a teen-ager, but I can well understand why you would resent the implication.
How come a writer like Ernest Hemingway, who famously took his own life, can be fervently admired and imitated by countless young men, and nobody describes them as cultists?
Trish
Seattle, USA
Monday, December 8, 2003
Ciara, you are allowed to appreciate Plath as a poet. Depression or teenage has nothing to do with it & those who like to talk of a Sylvia Cult or the fact that she was a depressive and figure out that that is the real reason why she attracts a certain type of person: well, that only goes as far as to show the limit of their imagination.
It's a flimsy excuse to make people think they're saying something extraordinary and in Plath's case it has gained a kind of truist position. 1 could say that about almost any other poet (just to think how many poets it is actually said about): Byron, Pope, Auden, Betjeman, Larkin ... the list is endless. There always has to be something psychotic, in fact, about any poetry lover which says a lot about our civilisation (particularly of the English)! The case is the exact opposite in Eastern Europe, in places suhc as Lithuania, which I visited in 1999. There to be in love with poetry or a certain poet is considered civil, as it should be!
Rehan Qayoom
London, UK
Monday, December 8, 2003
With all due respects, Jack, this question touches a nerve. There is a Sylvia cult precisely because the person and the art are one, theme, anger and fear and damage; and this tips over into the danger zone precisely because of the suicide skein, which is woven in with all the rest, inextricable--it's part of the biography...
"There are forbidden truths that man was not meant to know." Nor, apparently, woman either; "Death and the sun, looked in too deeply, will burn you away."
I think it was Elizabeth Hardwick who commented that feminine "niceness" was nowhere to be found in Plath, and that was precisely the appeal--also, the danger; and as Oates commented, Plath had no love, not even enough self-love to survive--and that is crucial. Without self-love, one will not live, because we are all animals under the skin; and too much consciousness of this turns one into a ravening beast. The question then becomes, survival at what cost. --and Plath's anger may be taken as pure because she did not spare herself--literally; but what is the good in that? If criticism changes nothing, betters nothing, what is the use? This is a passing mood all have visited, but it pays nothing to linger there; the valley of the shadow of death is good for no one.
Still, all who live are in its shadow; but without a balance between sun and moon, light and day, day and dark, life becomes impossible. Plath was caught between the scissors of a paradox, and sacrificed herself to it, rather than mastering it--as all must, who live. She is a martyr to a partial world, and the air around her soured into words. The words live, embers of a terrible fire.--but to what end? What is the use of it? That is the unanswerable question; and that is why the Plath cult lives--because death is an unanswerable question--but a questionable answer.
That's my view of it, anyway. And I am only one, in a world of teeming millions. Read the Hardwick, and the Oates.
Her poetry is possibly not studied more because, as I think I've said earlier on this forum, Plath arrived just as poetry was going out of the mainstream, to be replaced by Song; she arrived just after Dylan Thomas, and just before Elvis Presley, and died before Bob Dylan. Poetry now is a brackish backwater; Ever since Elvis, Orpheus wears a guitar. Just like in the old days. It's always darkest before the dawn. And, in a paradox--Plath is made of paradoxes--her vitality lay precisely in the candor of dismantling the old poetic rhetorics of rhyme and rhythm for a fierce candor of blurting-it-right out. If a poem is a song, this is a negative virtue, and the Eliot age was highly artificial, not to say fake, as in Eliot's straight-faced and churchly pronouncements that the artist is nowhere in his art--which were actually taken seriously at the time; as a critic of poetry, the francophile Eliot was precursor to the deconstructionists.
I think it was in The Atlantic Monthly that a poetry critic said that as a poet, he preferred John Lennon. It's a simple matter of rhythm. But I doubt if even extreme Plath cultists can quote many poems of hers IN FULL; the language is too baroque, too far from the demotic; that is its exaltation, and its achilles-heel. --See Woolf, "Room of One's Own," on why people stopped quoting poets after Tennyson. Plath must be a cult, she lived, and died, in a culdesac, far from the mainstream. Poetry is now an academic exercise, like, oh, I don't know, macrame, or the Society for Creative Anachronism--something to keep the professors busy, on those irrelevant islands-in-the-stream we call campuses--occupational therapy for English majors.
Kenneth Jones
Berkeley, USA
Monday, December 8, 2003
This is answer to the person who wanted a recipe by Sylvia Plath. The full context of a recipe appears in the Guardian UK website.
Kenneth Ferris
San Antonio Texas, USA
Sunday, December 7, 2003
I agree with Jack on the matter of the cult of Gospel of Sylvia Plath. The controversy and scandal helps keep Plath's name out there, but I feel for the wrong reasons. Her life and death, both very important, tend to overshadow her reason for living: her art. There is no doubt that the cult status of Plath, which has been around since what, the late 1960s, got Plath's name on reading lists and the tongues of many people. But now, many decades later, her importance as a poet and writer needs to come out from behind that shadow.
My attitude regarding Plath's life and death wavers somewhat. But, the way I feel about her writing is constant. Her work is worth discussing and debating; her life too. But her death is simply not to be understood and emulation of her suicide is senseless. She even wrote, in "Zoo Keepers Wife" that "Some things of this world are indigestible." Plath has this kind of Kurt "Teenage angst has paid off well" Cobain (there I said it) crop of followers and "believers" that frankly doesn't do much good.
The best way to understand Sylvia Plath is to read her work and discuss her work. There are many veterans out there who possess a knowledge that may be tapped like a keg. The presence of her life that is obviously in her poems and fiction may be considered as a footnote. Both her life and her work are extremely important and interesting, and separating the two will lead to a higher appreciation and a true respect.
Peter K Steinberg
Boston, USA
Sunday, December 7, 2003
In response to Kate's post- Sylvia loved to read The Joy of Cooking, a cookbook which is still published today, although I imagine many of the recipes have changed. According to Kate Moses, author of Wintering, one of her favorite recipes was Tomato Soup Cake. I've not tried this cake yet. (Frankly, it does not sound particularly appetizing.) But you can obtain a copy in the links section of this forum (see Baking With Sylvia). Her journals, the later ones in particular, are another good source for information about what she enjoyed cooking (and eating!) I hope this was helpful!
Additionally, has anyone heard the rumor about the locked trunk that cannot be opened until 2023? I read an article which hinted that it may contain one of her lost journals....
Kelly Hawkins
Lawrence, USA
Sunday, December 7, 2003
Kate, Sylvia Plath was especially fond of pineapple upside down cake, a dessert that was especially popular in the 50s and 60s. She also wrote longingly of casseroles. I don't recall specifics there, but it was probably something along the lines of cheese-ham-noodles. Any of these recipes can be found in vintage cookbooks, esp. Betty Crocker's. Good luck, and have fun! What a wonderful, novel way to try to experience some of Sylvia Plath's influences.
Trish
Seattle, USA
Sunday, December 7, 2003
I am perplexed as to where these large numbers of so-called Plath-obsessed teenaged cultists are hanging, because I haven't seen any of them. On this forum, we've had a number of teen-aged women and men write about Sylvia. Not one of them seemed to me to be suicide-obsessed, or anything less than genuinely interested in Sylvia Plath's life and work. I have not personally observed any sort of cult about Sylvia Plath's suicide at all. Is it so hard to believe that teen-aged girls could simply admire Sylvia's blazing talentand her extraordinary courage, courage that flagged, yes, but persevered nonetheless, even against overwhelming pressures? Why can't we simply give teen-aged girls a little credit for a little intelligence?
Trish
Seattle, USA
Sunday, December 7, 2003
Plath's scar results from her first suicide attempt in 1953. I, myself have never been able to notice it in any pictures...and believe it is something more noticable if one were to be face to face with Plath, in person (obviously not possible), rather then in a photograph
.Stephanie
Ottawa, Canada
Sunday, December 7, 2003
On the Sylvia Cult: I hate that people assume because I have a 'teen' tacked on to the end of my age and that I have some psychiatric 'problems' that I must only like Plath because she was depressed. Why am I not allowed to appreciate her as a poet?
Ciara
Monaghan, Ireland
Sunday, December 7, 2003
Sydney Kim of Hanover (perhaps in nearby New Hampshire?) wants to know opinions of forum readers on "this seemingly cult status of Sylvia Plath." I think a quick scan of the postings on even a few of the dozens of Plath groups and websites will show that the cult is alive and well, especially among young women of college age and just beyond. Over the last few years I have read postings from obviously depressed and even suicidal people who seem to worship Sylvia Plath as a kind of goddess of Brilliant but Wronged Womanhood. They identify with her longings and her suffering, and they tend to see Ted Hughes as little better than excrement. They tend to argue over (especially scandalous) biographical details on a scale nearly equal to that of today's pop culture celeb-worshippers.
That being said, there is also a large group of people who are devoted to Plath because her life and art are a challenge to explore, even to the point of emotional involvement. They (and I include myself among these) enjoy serious discussion about their Favorite Subject, but they are not fanatic Sylvia-worshippers or suicide-fantasizers. Any newcomer to the Plath scene had better be ready to sort out the actual life and art of Plath from the cult blather. The Plath cult situation is all the more disturbing to me because it reflects our larger obsessions with celebrity and scandal at the expense of more substantial interests and pursuits. I'm sure our political leaders are happy with these public obsessions, which draw public attention away from whatever nefarious activities they themselves are engaged in!
Jack Folsom
Sharon, Vermont, USA
Friday, December 5, 2003
I am currently doing a project on Sylvia Plath's life and focusing on her homemaker/mother side. I have read that food was very prominent for her, and that she had several odd Ladies Home Journal type recipes that she prepared often. I have been doing research to find these recipes and have had no luck. Does anyone know any of these recipes or know where I might be able to find them? Thanks.
Kate Stuber
McLean, USA
Friday, December 5, 2003
Trish in Seattle--actually, at least one writer did speak with Plath's high school teacher, and he remarked that, even in high school, Plath seemed to get no pleasure from her success as the "class writer"...it's in one of the bios out there, but I can't recall which offhand...but that's the only quote from him I've seen so far.
Addendum to that--the reviewer in the London Review of Books said we won't get the full Plath story for a century--I've since been doing some research on Custer's Last Stand, and, believe it, over a hundred years later, new diaries and things are still being unearthed, including arrows pulled from the bodies (that's a memoir by William O Taylor, just published this last decade)...so, it may be out there, just buried in a drawer somewhere...
But, cautionary note--the more time elides things, the less there may be, fire floods bankruptcy etc....
Kenneth Jones
Berkeley, USA
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
All this talk of Sylvia's facial scar but I'm not aware of how she got it- can someone tell me?
Ciara
Monaghan, Ireland
Tuesday, December 2, 2003
I am very interested in finding out more about Plath's relationship with a Jesuit priest ("Father Michael"?), including correspondence (where to find it, if available?), history about this man, and his present whereabout, living or deceased. Can anyone help?
Dr. Bob Fournier
Forestdale, USA
Monday, December 1, 2003
