The Sylvia Plath Forum

Yesterday I heard the news. My husband told me as I was cooking dinner. I stood there for quite a while, mouth open, staring. Sadness, shock.

I've lived with Sylvia Plath's legacy since I was a teenager (she is one of my favorite poets). I also, when young, went through the hatred of Ted and all he stood for. As the years passed, and I lived more of life, I softened and realized he was a victim, just like his wife and kids, in that saga. Reading his Birthday Letters revealed much about the man, and much about Sylvia. You could sense the struggle for balance, for equilibrium, present in their daily lives. Sylvia is our goddess-poet, yes, but she must have been a terrible hell to live with.

Godspeed, Ted Hughes! Your work is now finished. Thank you for Birthday Letters. It was generous of you, and I'm sure, healing -- giving you a sense of personal closure

Sheila T.
 New Jersey, USA
Saturday, October 31, 1998


Does anyone know where this great poet is to be buried?

Steve Gorrell
 Urbana, Illinois, USA
Saturday, October 31, 1998


I only learned of the death of Ted Hughes this morning, glancing at someone's paper on the subway. For once, I am speechless. And astounded once again at the terrible poetic resonance that clings to his story - the fact that he died the day after Sylvia's birthday, that his true "birthday letter" this year was his own death. Grief, grief, grief for this man I never knew. I maligned Hughes in my own imagination for so long, until the appearance of "Birthday Letters," that gut-wrenching, loving, flawed, and sublimely human work, so full of phosphorescence, trembling with the curious daemonic power that eddies beneath the surface of all our lives, our relationships, but particularly that of Plath and Hughes, whom "the stars married." The light-bearing Melissa Dobson suggests to us that his final work was an act of redemption; I can only attest that, for me, a mere "Reader," he more than accomplished that redemption. His poetry, essays, criticism, and, if they are ever published, his letters offer testimony to the fact that our loss is greater than many of us perhaps realized when he was alive. A terrible, tortured story has reached its end.



Rest in peace, Mr. Hughes.

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Friday, October 30, 1998


I too was deeply saddened to hear of Hughes' death ... it is, indeed, a profound loss, on so many levels ... and words are, well, quite difficult to summon ...

Heidi
 Queensland, Australia
Friday, October 30, 1998


I was very glad to read recently that Sylvia's daughter, Frieda, is today a successful painter and writer (who looks remarkalby like Sylvia, by the way!). She said she has not read ALL of her parents' work, and said that she does not read books about her parents because, in her words, "... Reading them wouldn't help me in any way."

How true, how true. I'm glad to see that Frieda is alive and thriving, and is not struggling under the dark burden of her mother's ill-fated legacy. I love Sylvia's poetry and prose -- I think she was one of the finest minds of our age. However, I think today someone like her might've gotten better therapy, or a drug treatment, that would have prolonged her life and given her spirits a lift. Again, I'm glad her daughter lives and thrives, something her mum was never able to do.

Sheila T.
 New Jersey, USA
Friday, October 30, 1998


Nancy, like you, I was shocked and saddened at the news, even though it was predicted by some on the forum in the past. His poetry reflected an "Englishness" that is not often reverberated throughout the world; rawness, energy and intesity.

Words that we could apply to Plath.

But when the sadness turns into something more mundane, we on the forum will be wondering what goodies will come of this; any journals appearing?

Then, there is Frieda, " a clean slate, with [her] own face on" who has dedicated the British edition of her latest poetry, appearing in February, to "Daddy". A compulsion, or something we cannot understand.

Donna
 Victoria, Australia
Friday, October 30, 1998



Could anyone tell me which poem of Sylvia Plath reflects the relationship among people?

And where can I find interpretation and critiques on Plath's "The Disquieting Muses", "Medusa" and "Daddy"?

Please do contact me if you can help. Thanks a lot.

Joy Sze-yeng Foo
 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Friday, October 30, 1998



I returned home today from a week-long business trip and eagerly brought up the Forum, expecting news and commentary of Frieda Hughes' new book and Sylvia's birthday. The news that Ted Hughes had died truly stunned and saddened me ... and the eerie timing left me in shivers.

I wanted to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Elaine and a number of frequent contributors for giving Ted Hughes equal time -- and occasionally the benefit of the doubt -- in many postings. I admit I had often been guilty of conveniently painting him as the villain in the Plath mythology at times, and sadly I didn't learn to appreciate his work until very recently. What a gift he gave the legions of Plath fans in adding to his late wife's legend via "Birthday Letters," before it was too late for him to be heard.

I'd like to leave as my parting thought an excerpt from the poem Hughes wrote on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales:



Nancy
 Falls Church, Virginia, USA
29 October 1998



IT IS WITH GREAT SADNESS
WE LEARNED OF THE
DEATH OF TED HUGHES 1930-28th October 1998 
 

        From now on the land
        Will have to manage without him.
        But it hesitates, in this slow realisation of light,
        Childlike, too naked in a frail sun,
        With roots cut
        And a great blank in its memory.

        from The day he died, Moortown




I have heard rumours recently that Plath's last journals were not destroyed, and Hughes is going to publish them. If anyone has any information I would be grateful.

Libby
 York, UK
Wednesday, October 28, 1998


Hi, I'm a performing arts student and I wish to adapt Plaths poetry into a theatrical piece. Has anyone got any ideas or infomation that might help me? I want to look at her life in relation to her own and Hughes poetry, through the rythm and the imagry. Any ideas would be great. Send them to Josiefinch@hotmail.com.uk. Thanks.

Josie
 Yoxford, England
Tuesday, October 27, 1998


Click here for a photo of Sylvia's grave in Heptonstall, UK taken today on what would have been her 66th birthday

Elaine Connell
 Hebden Bridge, UK
Tuesday, October 27, 1998


Dena, lucky you - I hope your visit with the Baskins goes well. I'm sure we all are hoping for a lengthy posting about the encounter and anything of interest you can repeat to us about Hughes and Plath. I for one would be very interested to know Baskin's interpretation of Hughes' poem in "Birthday Letters" - I can't remember the title (is it "The Portrait?), but the one where an artist (is it Baskin?) does a portrait of Sylvia and a mysterious figure appears in the background, lurking over her shoulder. It's a chilling poem, and if Baskin is indeed the artist, the chance to discuss it with him would be too happy an opportunity to let slip by! Do give us a full report!

FYI: "The Snake Pit" was made into a film. Released in 1948, it starred Olivia de Havilland, was directed by Anatole Litvak, and was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. Supporting cast includes Beulah Bondi and the ever-luminous Celeste Holm. It received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Actress (de Havilland), Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and Best Score (Alfred Newman). Happily, it is available on video, so you can at least see the movie if you cannot find the book! An Internet review runs as follows: "Social problem drama about the treatment of the mentally ill makes a plea for shock therapy that seems shocking itself today. De Havilland is superb as the young woman who is committed. An important film in its day, it now seems dated and sensational." In other words, it is now a camp classic. I've never seen this film, but there is a famous scene that I remember seeing in a documentary - the camera looks down Hitchcock-style upon a huge room of gibbering lunatics with De Havilland cringing in the center of the frame . . . not an easy scene to forget once you've seen it. And of course there is a famous reference to it in the Billy Wilder classic "All About Eve," in which the great Bette Davis, as the aging actress Margo Channing, cries mid-tantrum: "Cut! Print! What happens next? Do I get dragged off screaming into the Snake Pit?"

Happy viewing!

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Monday, October 26, 1998


In truth, while I have long been a fan of SP, I only stumbled upon this site while attempting to research a mammoth paper on her work. Well, not mammoth--twenty pages or so. In any case, I have greatly enjoyed reading all the comments and queries as they have helped me procrastinate if nothing else. I count myself honored to enter a new one into the bunch...

IF anyone, anyone at all, would like to offer her thoughts on the role of dolls in SP's poetry, or on the role of dolls in the fifties (preferably before wednesday, oct. 28) please do so. and even if it is after the 28th I would love to hear from you anyway, just for my own intellectual stimulation.

Michelle Coghlan
 Birmingham, AL, USA
Sunday, October 25, 1998


"The Offers" may suggest that the title "Birthday Letters" refers not to a commemoration of Plath's birthday but to Hughes's -- Hughes receiving annually "an afterworld memento,/Every year a card from Honolulu" (a bit of "ghostly humour" from a woman perfected). This constitutes the perennial inversion of Hughes's world: Plath, in an earthly paradise, "had finessed [her] return to the living" by "leaving [Hughes] as [her] bail . . . In the land of the dead." What is it that Plath is requiring of Hughes in this poem? Is she "daring [him] . . . to speak to the dead"? Or for the dead, perhaps? He writes that "Less and less Did I think of escape." Escape from what? Her memory?

In "The Offers" there are three incarnations, each one progressively unburdened. The first apparition is "heavy with packages"; the second has been stripped of its poems ("Death had repossessed your talent"); the third is "new made." This last incarnation is described as "a cobalt jewel." In Hughes's poem "Red," the last poem in "Birthday Letters," he writes, "Blue was better for you. Blue was wings. . . . Blue was your kindly spirit -- not a ghoul/But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful." If we are to believe with Hughes that "the jewel [Plath] lost was blue," then her return to him as "a cobalt jewel" is significant. In the last lines of "The Offers" Hughes writes that Plath's voice was "peremptory, as a familiar voice/Will startle out of a river's uproar." A striking choice of words, given that Hughes's 1983 collection of typically Hughesian poems is titled "River." What "gentle ultimatum" is Plath giving him when she says "Don't fail me"? Could "Birthday Letters" be its fulfillment?

I'd like to think that Plath, in her hold on Hughes (whether poetic or supernatural) offered him redemption (through what would be for him a linguistic departure, a different kind of poetry); and in accepting this offer (in writing the "Birthday" poems), he is redeeming them both.

Melissa Dobson
 Newport RI, USA
Friday, October 23, 1998


Live and up-to-the-minute news on Frieda Hughes' "Wooroloo": I've read about a third of the book so far. It's frustrating, because I for one simply cannot avoid comparing her to her parents. My feeling at the moment is that Frieda is much more her Daddy's daughter, as is only natural. His influence is everywhere, as Peter says. In fact, "The Readers" could have been written by Hughes, and WAS, in his poem entitled "The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother." They stand together as twin rebukes, a poetic statement of solidarity from the Hughes family. The Plathian influence, upon close reading, is negligible - there is none of her mother's razor wit, dazzling bitchery, nor the death-ridden, exquisite blue light (fortunately for Frieda personally, I should add!) What does take one off guard is the fact that Frieda often chooses subjects (such as three very good poems about her surgical operations) that echo Plath's own. However, Frieda, like her father, is best when she loses herself entirely and writes about the natural world: in this case, an exotic, Rousseau-like, Australia. Her attempts at "confessional poetry" - such as "Granny" - don't really work for me. If I didn't know who "Granny" was - I mean, rather, that if it was anyone else's granny but Freida Hughes' - the poem wouldn't really pass the "who cares?" test for me. I need to keep reading as my schedule permits, but thus far I think Frieda is a poetic talent who has yet to find an independent voice, but who has written some good (and some of them are quite good) poems in the manner of Ted Hughes. I hope she's allowed to develop in peace.

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Friday, October 23, 1998


Michael...Frieda's book was released about two weeks ago. "Readers" was first printed in The Guardian November 1997. I do think the poems are very crafty, and the Aurelia poems I feel are quite good. It seems remarkable that she hasn't read all or really too much of her parents writing because the poems show a great similarity in tone of voice, word choice, subject & theme. Also, it's a neat trick to write poems based on her paintings (i.e. Wooroloo, which is an excellent painting too!). And you are right, the photo they used it a spitting image of our Sivvy. As far as I know it was published first in the States...as there isn't any mention of Faber & Faber (or any other UK publisher) publishing it in the book. Elaine, is it out in the UK?

Peter Steinberg
 Alexandria, Virginia, USA
Thursday, October 22, 1998
(We have added Wooroloo to our Books and Links page - EC)


Michael, I've purchased but haven't had a chance to read "Wooroloo" yet, only stare in astonishment at the jacket cover picture and browse through the pages to ascertain that yes, indeed, Frieda is Plath and Hughes' poetic love child. I found that Time magazine article on the Net, and the excerpts do tantalize. Here's another one, this time from a poem called "Granny," obviously about Ms. Aurelia:

Yikes! Off, off, eely tentacle! Here's a carrot for all you Plathomaniacs, and I'm not joking: Frieda Hughes will be reading from her new book of poetry this coming Wednesday, October 28, at 6 pm, at the Marymount Manhattan College, 221 East 71st Street , between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, in glamorous New York City (212-517-0400). I, for one, plan on being there if my blasted schedule permits. Should we all wear Forum buttons so we know each other? Or Sylvia t-shirts? Well, anyway, I will be the one uncontrollably weeping in the front row, waving my bic lighter.

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Thursday, October 22, 1998


I haven't checked in with the Forum in several weeks and was surprised to see no mention of Frieda Hughes' new volume of poetry titled, "Wooroloo." I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy yet, but have just stumbled across Time Magazine (dated October 19)--it contains a phenominal review of the book--as well as an interview with Frieda.

Interestingly, she claims to have read some, but not all, of her parents' writing and says she didn't even know her parents were famous until she was assigned to read some of their work in school. Suspicious...

The bits of her poems quoted in the Time piece seem well crafted and share much of Plath's own acidity, like in "Readers," which the magazine says, "rails at those who have made a cult out of her mother." An excerpt from "Readers,"

The large picture of Frieda that accompanies the story must have been posed intentionally: I don't think it's my imagination that it resembles the widely-circulated photo of Plath, the one used by most anthologies and that serves as a background for the Forum.

So, has anyone gotten their mitts on Wooroloo yet?

Michael McGraw
 New York City, USA
Thursday, October 22, 1998


Thank you to Peter Steinberg, for alerting me to the (add your favorite superlative here) new poem by Ted Hughes, "The offers," published in this past weekend's Sunday London Times (October 18 - available on the Internet). A few superlatives of my own: sublime, chilling, mesmerizing, profound. I am, quite frankly, reeling from it. Hughes, with these poems about his dead wife, is absolutely reinstating Romanticism at the close of the 20th Century; an almost impossible task, it seems to me, and yet, and yet . . . the unique, painful story of Hughes and Plath lends itself to the task - their story is indeed a 20th Century version, as I've stated before, of the legendary examples set by Byron, Shelley, Bronte, and the like.

Reading this poem, I was aghast that Hughes didn't include it in "Birthday Letters." It suddenly struck me, however, that this may well be a NEW Birthday Letter - published, as it was, a week before Plath's upcoming birthday. If this is indeed a new poem, its appearance implies to me that a private ritual has now become a public one, that we have on our hands the inauguration of a macabre and astounding annual event -- one that makes me shake my head in wonder and admiration at Hughes' dazzling audacity. Certainly, such a tradition would make him excruciatingly vulnerable to severe questioning of motive (self-promotion, capitalization on Plath's name) and, ultimately, cynical ridicule (an unhealthy dose of which I'm sure we have to look forward to on this Forum). But if one puts such easy cynicism aside for a moment, the poignancy of such an act might just break the heart. The aging Hughes is transforming himself before our eyes into an almost archetypal figure and, through a bizarre and moving act of public . . . .what? penance? sorcery? . . ., he is alchemizing a famously ugly and daemonic myth into a redemptive, transcendent one. It seems to me that there is a force at work here that resonates so deeply beyond the reach of rational understanding that the only appropriate response is that advised by Hughes' poetic father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Tuesday, October 20, 1998


Glad I found this page!!

I am studying comparative literature in Austria and have to give a talk about Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy'. As I'm not too experienced with poetry yet, I got no idea how to interpret this poem and so far I had a hard time finding background information. I only found out that there are some biographical aspects contained.

I would really be thankful for every help I get.

Elisabeth Dambck
 Vienna, Austria
Tuesday, October 20, 1998

I am doing a history paper on Plath as a reflection of the intellecutal ideas of her time, particularly existentialism and Freud's theories, as well as the social realities of her time, concerning mainly the War, the Holocaust, and the position of women in marriage. I would just like to hear someone's side on Plath in that respect, within the context of and her being a product of her social and political climate, etc. Also, if anyone could suggest some good books on that, as opposed to just literary interpretation resources. Also, because of my own personal interest, as I have long been a reader of Plath.

Christina
 Toronto, Canada
Monday, 19 Oct 1998


Hello, my name is Melinda Morgan and I am a student at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I am working with a group of students in my Psych 160 class on a psychological biography of Sylvia Plath. My particular section of the biography concerns her family and how they affected her. If anyone has any information that could help me out I would really appreciate it. My email address is morganma@jmu.edu. Thank you so much for any help.

Melinda Morgan
 Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA
Monday, 19 Oct 1998

I've just found this forum and would like to contribute some thoughts, especially as Ive just read Seamus Heaneys tribute to Ted Hughes Birthday Letters. I discovered Plath in the mid-Sixties when she became prominent in contemporary thinking on poetry. The New Poetry, edited by A. Alvarez, revised edn. was just out and immediately I read her work I was intrigued, though I knew nothing about her life until I read Alvarez's The Savage God, his book dealing with suicide. Since then I've never moved far away from Plath though there have been long gaps when I've discovered many of the dozens of poets writing both here and in the States. I've also met many women who have been influenced by her work, sometimes negatively enough to feel that suicide is glamorous. I've stayed at the Arvon Foundation near Hebden Bridge and visited her grave after it had been defaced by women who objected to the Hughes instead of plain, Sylvia Plath. I've read her journals and the biographies as well as most of the studies and I feel I know the facts of her life well enough to have formed an opinion.

I've never seen the I of the poems as stable, and though I know her journals and her lived experience inform her poetry I've always seen the poems as standing apart from autobiography - they use the poet's experience and make something new, which is Plath's art, and why women respond to her work, because even a poem written straight from an episode from life - Tulips, for example, manages to say something important about the human condition, however tentatively.

Its debatable whether Plath would have become the poet she was if she had not married Ted Hughes. Whatever their difference, they couldn't help but influence one another, and Hughes inspired Plath to work at her poetry and perfect her art and to find her voice in spite, or because of, the failure of their relationship. I've always seen Plath as a great example of female fury, leading to revenge.

She was interested in the Medea myth - though, thankfully, she stopped short of murdering her children. I also think the difficult relationship Plath had with her mother was central to her work and to her fury - read Medusa! Because of the death of her father at a sensitive time of her life, she developed a peculiar hatred of her mother, which was the reverse side of her natural love for her.

The Bee poems are marvellous poems, and were written at the beginning of her final phase. They're marvellous for women to read, in fact all of Plaths poems were - and still are - inspiring for women to read, not because theyre autobiographical but because they connect with women's experience in a completely original voice.

Out of all the derivative poems since Plath's death, no one has successfully captured that voice, and never could. In many ways, it's too insistent - women who want to write need to stay away from it, at least whilst they're writing. Another interesting, probably truthful fact, is that Plath's ambition lay more in the direction of the short story, at least for a long time. She thought an acceptance by the New Yorker would be the pinnacle of her career (!) and it's curious to speculate how much she guessed her true worth as a poet who would last. I've read through the forum and would love to have time to cover more of the points raised another time.

Maggie Mountford
 Wells, UK
Sunday, October 18, 1998

This is more along the lines of a question that I need answered asap; I have to study her poem Mushroom and comment on the themes and idead in the poem....If anyone can give me some insight I would appreciate it!!

Zarin
 Cape Town, South Africa
Sunday, October 18, 1998

I am currently trying to research the earlier popular (as opposed to literary/critical) reception of Sylvia Plath's poetry, novel, and posthumous "legend." I want to look at the intense identification she inspired in mnay women, and the women in the 1960's and 70's embraced her as "speaking" their experiences in a representative way; I also want to look at earlier feminist and proto-feminist responses to her work. I imagine that mass-market women's magazines as well as small feminist literary presses could be possible sources. If contributors could direct me to promising sources, I would be very appreciative.

Also, Ted Hughes, in one of his essays or interviews, described Plath's genius as her ability to go "straight for the central, unacceptable things." I unfortunately have been unable to find this citation--can anyone help me?

Miriam Bartha
 Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA
Mon, 12 Oct 1998

Plath's relationship with her father is that she didn't have much of one. He died when she was only a child. Plath felt abandoned by this. Many have suggested (including herself) that she modeled Hughes after her father. A good poem for you to read by Plath would be "Daddy." In it she liberates herself from her "daddy" and from Hughes (whom she characterizes as Nazi's).

In response to your question about "Birthday Letters:" It is Ted Hughes response to the suicide of Plath and to her poems. He has long been thought (mostly by feminist critics) to be the cause (intentional or not) of her suicide.

Carin
 Santa Cruz, CA, USA
Saturday, October 10, 1998

I think Donna makes an astute point bringing up truth claims, and thinking about that reminded me of the pertinence of 'Lady Lazarus'. Here's a performer who finds a crowd fascinated by her "autobiography". It doesn't matter that what she's revealing is staged ('Do I terrify?') and horrifying--the audience still shoves in to catch 'a word or a touch/ Or a bit of blood'. Yet, as she tells them, 'Flesh, bone, there is nothing there'--they will not find her self in the bits of the body, in the facts of her life. It is OUT of such rubbish that she rises all-powerful; the crowd is wasting its time, missing the main event: the poetry.

Robyn
 Adelaide, Australia
Thursday, October 8, 1998

If Plath had a claim to truth, such as the Romantics did (see Keats for instance), then it would be plausible to argue for a mythology of the "I" or a particular truth in her work. I don't believe Plath ever makes those claims. Indeed, she was well aware of the problematic concepts of Modernity, whereby the idea of A grand narrative was increasingly hard to achieve. Some biographers, like Janet Malcom, are aware of the difficulties of constructing an "I" - are they not, Elaine?

And speaking of biography, Sylvia Mikkelson, what is your source for the argument that SP's mother was 'partly of Jewish descent'?? I am curious as this has been rebutted many times.

Donna
 Victoria, Australia
Wednesday, October 7, 1998

Seems to me we have our very own "bee meeting" buzzing right here on the forum - that's me, on the left, with the swollen lips and a white hankie on my head!

Elaine, I agree very much with your analysis of the "I" phenomenon in Plath's work in the context of the time the poetry was written. My own interpretation is slightly different, however. I don't think there is an "imagined life of a persona" versus Plath's "own individual voice and actual life" so much as there is an effort by the poet to subvert Eliot's pervasive poetic to her own end - which was to experiment with the methods of the burgeoning confessional school of Lowell and Sexton. In other words, she cunningly mythologizes and rewrites her own history as an inspired compromise between the two, dealing in code and smokescreen. What is achieved is actually a "spiritual" autobiography, then, rather than a "factual" one on the order of the quasi-documentary "Life Studies" (although truth be told, Lowell did quite a bit of rewriting history himself) and Lowell's later works.

The peerless Melissa Dobson spoke of Plath's "I" as a poetic conceit, and if we are speaking in terms of "fact," then I must agree with her completely. Does this make the "I", then, a "character?" I don't think so, certainly no more a character than the heroine of the journals, in which Plath self-dramatizes to the point of straining credulity. I think that the Plathian "I" is, in fact, the "true" Plath - akin to the inscrutable "Me Myself" of Whitman, a hermetic entity entirely separate from the physical "Walt Whitman, one of the roughs." (cf. Bloom). It is her true voice, spirit, psyche, the creature wandering through that subjective universe of "The Moon and the Yew Tree." By revisioning and mythologizing her own "biography," Plath synchronizes it with her emotional experience of that biography - for her, it is "truer" than the "truth."

I should plead guilty here and now to Melissa's charge of reading the poetry as "a psychic autopsy of a suicide." However, I don't find that such an approach diminishes my admiration for Plath's work - instead, it seems to me to increase the poetry's significance, making it unique in literature. Taken piece by piece, each poem is a stunning, exquisite cold flame. Examining the poetry as a collective whole, I find it to be a trail of breadcrumbs, yes; it is the record of young genius of a poet (blindly? knowingly?) following the dictates of her unconscious over a precipice. There is a mythic resonance to Plath's story - Icarus? Phaeton? The Sorceror's Apprentice? - that haunted her, and haunts us still. I think this fact lies at the heart of the controversy over Plath's achievement. If not, what is all the fuss about?

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Tuesday, October 6, 1998

I don't disagree that the facts of Plath's life lend meaning to the poetry. When I write that one should consider the "I" and the "She" as separate, I do not mean that one should -- or could, at this point -- attempt to disregard the life in a reading of the poems. What I object to is a view of the poetry that is determined by the facts of the life -- a reading of the poetry that becomes a psychic autopsy of a suicide. The comments made here about complexity and paradox, the reconciliation or maintaining of opposites in the poetry, recall Plath's "The Birthday Present": "Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity./Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,/The glaze, the mirrory variety of it." It is this mirrory variety that informs the poetry and agitates against a reductionist, negational view.

Melissa Dobson
 Newport RI, USA
Monday, October 5, 1998

Just for the record, Sylvia's mother, Aurelia Schober was partly of Jewish descent. How true your remark, Elaine, about no one wondering about the "I" in Hughes's poems! Perhaps it is because as Margaret Dickie notes in Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath "Hughes's poems are literary artifacts, not magical incantations"

Sylvia Mikkelsen
 8270 Hoejbjerg (Aarhus), Denmark
Monday, October 5, 1998

On 'Stings': I think it's Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in No Man's Land (vol. 3?) who also point out that Plath rejects traditional poetic patterning here (i.e. have a look at 'The Bee Meeting') and uses a more defiant structuring, one that speaks of her own "flight". Also interesting are her use of colors: that vulnerable, blank, anonymous, impersonal white, the death-like gray, and of course the 'plush' and 'lion-red'. And the blue, which is often over-looked but equally significant. 'Blue dew from dangerous skin' seems to echo 'The Hanging Man''s (and 'Three Women''s) menacing 'blue volts', which come externally to threaten the vitality and very life of the self ('my strangeness'). I liked Peter's reading of it in terms of a young break up, but the line 'They thought death was worth it, but I/ Have a self to recover, a queen' seems ambiguous: is she "moving on", "letting it go" because it's not worth it? Or because she knows that she doesn't have to waste her time: the male bees die after mating, whilst the females survive.

Robyn
 Adelaide, Australia
Monday, October 5, 1998

The I's have it? I agree with Elaine that it is difficult, but possible, to find the true 'I' in Plath's poems.

In past posting, Jack & I had mentioned the Bee Poems as being crucial to Plath's poetry. I was reading them this morning and something hit me...I am very tempted to try and talk about one poem a day, but that might not work...so, today I'll just mention something I saw in 'Stings,' the universally-agreed key poem.

Most of the way through the poem, we find Plath struggling to determine whether or not she's got a Queen in her combs. She has become more comfortable with the idea of this bee keeping, almost an arrogance. (After all, she, like her Daddy, could handle bees and not be stung. She speculates on the appearace of her Queen, 'she is old, / Her wings torn shawls, her long body / Rubbed of its plush------.' She thinks the Queen is ashamed to show her face...

This is when Plath herself becomes the Queen. Hughes has left her at this point. She feels ashamed in her Devonian life, afraid to go outside because the neighbors might gawk at her.

Then she says, 'I am no drudge' and the poem takes off. She realizes that she can do something about the feeling she has...she's not old, she's not dependant.

The center of the poem then comes, when the onlooker, the 'great scapegoat' (Hughes) is stung by the bees. Plath says...'They thought death was worth it, but I / Have a self to recover, a queen.' So the little worker bees, the drudgers, have died for the cause of hurting that third person, with little stings (words?). And with that said, Plath becomes the Queen of her hive, her house, her life and her Self. She knows now that even though her marriage has crumbled, it isn't death, she isn't dead. And this recognition allows her to continue through this poem and about 20 others that month alone.

I think "Stings" is a giant metaphor for hurtful words, things spoken out of spite, like words spoken when young couples break. And through writing this poem, Plath is 'getting over it."

Peter Steinberg
 Alexandria, Virginia, USA
Sunday, October 4, 1998

As Robyn rightly states, one should avoid the "either/or" stance. It was precisely the points of tension between "two mutually exclusive things" that constituted the psychodynamics fuelling Plath's poetic creativity. Likewise, Plath the Woman and Plath the Poet should not be seen in terms of opposition. Plath, the Woman in all her chthonian rage was coolly observed by her Apollonian double, her "ice-eye",as she called it, which objectified her female body guiding it through the chamber of horrors in the Poet's Palace of Art, producing from its blood-jet "the aesthetic rose". Her colours were both white and red. Plath was an Apollonian Ariel, a white arrow with the tip pointed at her own red heart.

Sylvia Mikkelsen
 8270 Hoejbjerg (Aarhus), Denmark
Sunday, October 4, 1998

Time I got involved in some of the recent great debates on the Forum! Who is the "I" in Plath's poetry? I think that this can be very difficult to work out because she often moves between the voice and imagined life of a persona and her own individual voice and actual life within the same poem. A classic example of this is found in "Daddy" where the autobiographical and the imaginary life of the girl with the Electra complex and fascist father are so well intertwined.

But it is possible to distinguish between them. Otto Plath had a Germanic background but absolutely no connections with or sympathy for Nazism and Sylvia herself almost certainly did not have the Jewish ancestry the persona of the poem claims. However, at other points in the poem it is definitely Sylvia who is the speaker.


There are many other examples within the poetry of this shifting between an assumed voice and a personal voice. Why do it like this? A major reason I believe was the status of the "I" within contemporary critical theory.

As I've mentioned before, the ideas of Eliot and Pound dominated poetic thinking during Sylvia's education. They had rejected the "I" of the Romantics as part of the subjectivism of their art. The concept that the poet should be, above all, impersonal ruled pretty much supreme and I feel it very much influenced Sylvia, who was in so many ways a great conformist. Not surprising then that the sense of who "I" is can be so tentative within her work. We need to remember how young she was, still at the stage of experimenting with form and technique.

Being female is a further complicating factor in deciding who "I" is. This may well be amateur psychology but it seems to me that women have far more difficulties in establishing a firm sense of self than men do. This may ultimately result in a far richer life but it's hard to handle the choices. This is of course beautifully illustrated by Plath in "The Bell Jar" when she presents the image of the fig tree with each fig representing a different life path for her heroine.

Identity is just not the same thing for the sexes. Women are also often capable of greater empathy and this is probably another element in the difficulty we as readers may face in trying to establish who is the speaker in Plath's work. I find it interesting that we have no such problems with Hughes' poems as he's able to just lose himself in his subjects.

Elaine Connell
 Hebden Bridge, UK
Sunday, October 4, 1998

Again, I must disagree with the idea that Plath's suicide was "her ultimate creative act". I feel uncomfortable speculating about Plath herself (I think Melissa Dobson's right in highlighting the distinction between Plath's self and the selves of her poetry), but within her writing I tend to read a link (that Melissa also mentions, though rhetorically) between negation and silence, suggesting that suicide is an absence or negation of self, not an affirmative act. In "Edge", for example, the woman's self is absent: she is without voice, and only her body speaks. Dead, she is "perfected", but we know that "Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children" ("Munich Mannequins")--it cannot write or create. The act of silencing the self appears here utterly opposed to creation. Pausing to think about this, I'm aware that there are various counter-examples that can be dragged out against me, which reminds me again of the complexity inherent in Plath's poetry. It is like a person, constantly in flux, unable to be pinned down. Or, as Peter Steinberg pointed out, there are multiple voices within the poetry, making a single, definitive reading simply limiting and misguiding (as "Three Women" explicitly illustrates). And Sam's right: this is the attraction and the reason we write in. So feel free to disagree and show me alternatives.

Robyn
 Adelaide, Australia
Saturday, October 3, 1998

Circuits must be buzzing in Hebden Bridge today! Ah, eloquent Melissa Dobson, your black fingers, like the Yew Tree's, are wagging once again at this poor grim reaper, and in the process yew raise another hot topic - who exactly is the "I" of Plath's poetry? Marie of Romania?

Plath's sly introductory comments about "the speaker" of this or that poem for her BBC recording (see Hughes' notes in "The Collected Poems") are pure smokescreen. We simply know too much about this poet to disregard autobiography when approaching her work. It seems to me patently ridiculous to attempt to approach "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," for instance, without acknowledging their autobiographical elements (as Jacqueline Rose attempts to do in her parched, unbearable book). While she shifts things, exaggerates, and otherwise takes great license with the "facts," Plath herself stands centerstage in each poem, glowing eerily in the spotlight. Read chronologically, as Hughes arranges things in "The Collected Poems," Plath's poetry proceeds to tell a tale both as truthful and as fictionalized as "The Bell Jar" or the journals. If the "I" of the poetry is indeed a poetic conceit, then the poet, in her instability, certainly lost the power to differentiate between the two. "The woman is perfected" horrifies precisely because, in the case of Sylvia Plath, Art and Reality became one.

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Friday, October 2nd, 1998

Greetings all!

I am a new fan of Sylvia's. I have a question to throw out there to any interested parties...

I am studying Walt Whitman at the University and am trying to establish enough "links" between his writing and Plath's to warrent spending my semester studying Plath.

So far, what I have is the use of everyday language and the unlimited range of topics.

I am wondering if any of you Plath Experts have other directions for me to start off in....

Thank you.

Paul
 Milwaukee, USA
Friday, October 2, 1998

To pick up on Stewart's latest - He argues affirmation of the Self, yes. Not affirmation of life, he says, but only of survival? Now that we're into semantics, I would argue that life survival (if that's the term that Stewart wants to use) for Sylvia Plath in 1962 meant psychic rebirth after psychic decay and death. This rebirth can be seen as a "giving birth" to a renewed Self, as symbolized, for example in the bee poems.

The rebirth I am speaking of is of course not the first for Sylvia. On at least one prior occasion, her recovery from attempted suicide, the rebirth was also physical as well as psychic. We can probably agree also that the making of art was for her a tool or catalyst for psychic renewal -- an antidote for her "paralytic" self-destructiveness, which in turn was related to her depression -- what we now call "bipolar disorder."

Now in 1962, the "Ariel Sylvia" can rage herself back to life - only for a time, of course, because the "Paralytic Sylvia" is waiting in the wings with new afflictions of sinusitis, fevers, and what-have-you to mess up her mind and body.

For Sylvia as I see her, the spectacle of Death was a challenge. What in the face of it could reassert and even renew life? Answer: Creatures in Nature, renewing themselves. People, renewing themselves -- with their offspring, be they babies or poems, and even imagining themselves somehow transfigured after death.

Before I quit, let me just refer to my article on "Berck-Plage" which you can read via Anja Beckmann's Plath website. In it I describe my discovery in the Plath papers at Smith a whole omitted section of the poem in which the dirty shroud of the dead Percy Key is transformed into the white swaddling clothes of a baby, signifying renewal. But by the end of the poem there is also a paradox: the speaker says "For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma./There is no hope, it is given up." But just before, the earth around the grave is "a naked mouth, red and awkward" -- the red, fertile earth, open like a womb to receive what it had once given forth. Death and Fertility/Rebirth are interwoven and inseparable -- that is the paradox, and it is much in keeping with Sylvia's lifelong fascination with the Double, the Self and anti-Self. That is why we must have Satan (literally "Adversary")as our anti-Self. Otherwise our Self can never be actualized, eh?

Jack Folsom
 Sharon, Vermont, US
Friday, October 2nd, 1998

If anyone's interested in viewing some pictures of SP's grave and other pics. from England, you can see them at: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Cafe/3986/ Please email me if there are any corrections to make, or if you'd like to leave some feedback.....thanks.

Steve Gorrell
 Urbana, IL, USA
Friday, October 2nd, 1998

I think we're getting somewhere, Peter. Yes, I think, for me, it is the word "affirming" that makes me shake my head in wonder in reference to many postings on this forum . . .

You are also quite right to refer to the 1963 poems as the work of a "different" poet or voice; I think, in our debates, we often find ourselves lumping the two "poets" together, when perhaps we should describe one as Ariel poet and one as the "Edge" poet, (or the "Paralytic" poet). Ted Hughes makes reference to this difference, stating (I can't recall whether this was based on a conversation with Plath or not) that these poems were considered by SP as the beginnings of a new book. The Paralytic Poet's voice is certainly a calamitous reversal from the raging "Ariel" voice - see Hughes' essay on "Sheep in Fog" (found in the collection "Winter Pollen") for a moving examination of that poem as a hidden map of this reversal.

In Philip Roth's new novel, "I Married A Communist," one character muses, "Nothing so big in people and nothing so small, nothing so audaciously creative in even the most ordinary as the working of revenge." My feeling is that the Ariel poems were actually an interruption of, or detour from, Plath's trajectory throughout 1961 and the spring and early summer of 1962, a downward spiral that is resumed with tragic results in 1963. Whatever the personal crisis that inspired them, those poems (among them, "Tulips," "The Moon and the Yew Tree," "Blackberrying," "The Rabbit Catcher," "Event," "Mirror," "Berke Plage," "Crossing the Water," and "Elm") are increasingly resonant with the same hopeless despair and inexorable pull of the 1963 poems; although differing significantly in style, they are the work of the Paralytic Poet. With the discovery of Hughes' infidelity and the couple's separation, Plath's energy abruptly shifts - born out of Medean rage, the Ariel poet explodes, perhaps out of the witchy flames of that famous pyre in "Burning the Letters." In essence, I believe Plath's marital disaster actually gave her a new lease on life, gave her a tangible enemy, and allowed her scathing wit and genius to give itself full voice behind a "righteous cause" as she began to focus her rifle sights upon not only Hughes, but Mummy, Daddy, relatives, friends, society . . . It is this voice the feminist movement seized upon, misguidedly I think. As far as I can gather, it is the Ariel poet who is being referred to when some readers describe Plath's work as "life-affirming." I would argue that Self is being affirmed, not Life, with survival the goal, not celebration. The brilliant, haunting "Bee" poems are central to this brief period, yes, and I think, Elaine, that a good new project for us would be an examination of one of those pieces in our Analysis link.

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Friday, October 2nd, 1998

At the risk of oversimplification, I maintain that our differences on the Forum with respect to the affirmation/negation debate are largely rhetorical. As I've stated before on these pages, "life-affirming," as I and I think many others would use it to describe Plath's work, relates less to what the poems say than to how they say it -- or even that they say it. It makes sense to me that Stewart Clarke associate Plath's philosophic stance with Milton's Satan -- because it is a "created" stance, a stance given archetypal form in the poetry -- Plath's "I" of the poetry, the eye of the poet, must, if the discussion is about the poetry, be considered as separate from the "She" of the biographies. The persona(e) created in the poems, through language and cadence, through art distinctive to Plath, are the poems' accomplishment -- "The woman is perfected" is a poetic conceit. Milton's major triumph in Paradise Lost was the characterization of Satan -- we do not, however, as readers, attribute the qualities and "philosophy" of the character to his creator. We delight in the artistic achievement of Milton rather than tremble and quake at the fact that he unleashed a terrible beast into the world and made darkness visible. The fact of Plath's suicide should not preempt our obligation to deal critically with the work as a creative accomplishment on its own terms. As for Plath's stance being one of "absolute negation," I must disagree -- but here again I think the problem is rhetorical. Absolute negation in a poet would result in the absence of language. Absolute negation is silence. Art, poetry, is always a sign of life, never of death, no matter the subject matter.

Melissa Dobson
 Newport RI, USA
Friday, October 2, 1998

For the most part, the issue here is more with the word 'affirming' than with the word 'life.' Isn't that right?

Plath's Bee poems, written on these first days of October 1962, move from a sort of not-knowing (The Bee Meeting) to a thirst for possibilities (Wintering). In the middle poem Stings, Plath says..."I/ have a self to recover," and then she bursts into the sky, a red comet." Red was her color, the 'blood jet,' the 'red scar in the sky', she flew Ariel into the 'red / Eye, the cauldron of morning."

Throughout the poems she is completely in praise of Red. Red blood, veins, the life of it all. The poems were her life, and yes, they became more calm in January 1963, darker even, with a strong theme of closure & finality....but in those 12, 1963 poems it is almost a different writer, just like the writer of The Colossus and Ariel are completely different. The 1963 poems are on a whole other level.

The Self is indeed separated from Life, but it's these Selves of Sylvia Plath that 'have come so far.' Plath was coming apart at the seams when those final poems were written, but what she never got to know is that those poems too, were the 'poems of her life.'

Peter Steinberg
 Alexandria, Virginia, USA
Friday, October 2, 1998

Welcome to our ongoing debate, Robyn - I think your insistence on Plath's ambivalence does offer much food for discussion.

Plath's reference to poetry as the "blood jet" is very telling. While I have read some bizarre feminist analyses of this image as symbolic of menstrual blood (!), I think it is safe to say she is telling us (and herself) that the poetry (the "poems of my life") is in fact her life line, a thin red thread. The deadly resignation of the last poems, following "Sheep in Fog," implies to me that Plath felt the wild creative surge of the "Ariel" poems had passed (see "Mystic" and "Words") and that the tenuous life line had begun to swiftly unravel. Robert Lowell's eloquent statement that many of the poems seem to have been written "posthumously" is especially applicable here.

Still, when confronted with the phrase "life-affirming" in connection with Plath, I must always recoil in astonishment. At best, the few rays of light that break through the darkness are faint attempts to find a reason to endure just a while longer - tiny life preservers helpless against the relentless undertow of her psyche. One need look no farther than "Tulips" for clear evidence that, in Plath's poetry, the Self is set in opposition to Life, seeking instead the "peacefulness . . . the dead close on, finally." The Ariel poems stand as a bilious last will and testament, bequeathing chthonian rage and contempt to her survivors. Her chilling last poem, "Edge," depicting the dead poet as part of the final tableaux of some Euripidean drama, vividly communicates the idea that, to the self-dramatizing Plath, her suicide was her ultimate creative act.

Stewart Clarke
 USA
Thursday, October 1st, 1998

Yes Robyn, I agree with you on the ambiguity and complex representation of Plath as a poet/legend. It seems that it is easy to see her last works as a completion toward some sort of totality, summing-up of her life. Reading her as an either/or poet may interfere with her juxtoposition in life as a female, a poet and a person. It its her complexity that is celebrated in this forum alone.

Sam
 Melbourne, Australia
Thursday, October 1st, 1998





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