Plath and one of her residences.‘On Binge-Reading Sylvia Plath’: An Expanded Sonnet by Brian Yapko The Society May 2, 2023 Culture, Poetry, Satire 47 Comments . On Binge-Reading Sylvia Plath Verdammte mirror-bee-eyes stare at you As you describe in depth colossal pain. You say too much: your tormented achoo Your lack of faith, your overactive brain. I read your sadness—verses made of hurt And genius, from a coruscating pen Of acid-green, with not one word inert And not one word of sympathy for men. Your poetry exhausts me till I’m numb. The smidge of sympathy that I can spare Foresees the train wreck that is yet to come. And yet you claim that you eat men like air? A Lady Lazarus whose death bells chime; An Ariel who cannot fly or climb; A poet drowning in romantic grime; Who’s always, always running out of time… Enough of Plath-like bitter bell-jar rhyme! Despite your brilliant blues, shoes and I do’s, You were, poor Sylvia, condemned to lose. . Verdammte: “damned” in German . . Brian Yapko is a lawyer who also writes poetry. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. NOTE TO READERS: If you enjoyed this poem or other content, please consider making a donation to the Society of Classical Poets. The Society of Classical Poets does not endorse any views expressed in individual poems or commentary. Share this:Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Trending now: 47 Responses Monika Cooper May 2, 2023 I guess Plath is a prime example of there being more to poetry than form. She had the form but her spirit was anti-poetic. One of my teachers took her line “Love set you going like a fat gold watch” and noted how her hatred for everything she named in that line was palpable. “The real poet loves gold, loves watches, loves fatness, and loves love.” Binge reading her would be exhausting. I especially wouldn’t recommend it for an impressionable young woman. Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you for commenting, Monika. Binge-reading her is indeed exhausting, though I confess to having previously read most of these works (the collections “Ariel” and “Colossus”) in 1980 or so when I was in college and they were taught in an American poetry course. At the time I was impressed by what I saw as Plath’s uniquely iconoclastic voice and her sophisticated facility with language. Now I’m stunned by how modern she seems as a contemporary, non-classical poet (she was quite influential), how narcissistic she was (it’s always ALL about her) and how sad it is that she felt it necessary to confess so much pain to the world. Over 40 years after I first read her, I now see her work as dark, angry and depressed. Yet her language and imagery are incredible. She had great talent but one does not turn to Sylvia Plath for a little light reading. Reply Mary Gardner May 2, 2023 Exhausting is right, Monika. Being unfamiliar with Ms. Plath’s work, I found and read two of her poems – and wished I hadn’t. How did she get published? She was apparently a bitter woman. Bryan, your poem is excellent, “with not one word inert.” Thank you for the read. Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much indeed, Mary. Her work really does sizzle in a way — a brilliant but most unpleasant way. I suspect history will regard Sylvia Plath’s bitterness as her superpower. As for how she got published, I think Dr. Salemi’s interesting comment below describing the sociology of the late 50s and early 60s is illuminating. Somehow, Plath tapped into the zeitgeist of an era teeming with anger just below the surface waiting to erupt. Priscilla King May 7, 2023 Ah, but it worked for my roommate and me! At 17 and 18 we were capable of appreciating her skills and noting where she went wrong… * thinking that “attitude was all” * believing in the “miracles” of drugs * believing that consonance, readability, cheerfulness, and whimsicality were weaknesses (“the art of being a poetess”) and that she needed to write more “masculine” things, like Ted Hughes * believing premarital intercourse was liberating * snorting cocaine to unclog her sinuses, even if a doctor recommended it (Yes, one did!) * believing she needed to get Hughes back rather than dump him * and, worst of all, believing she’d be rescued before significant damage was done when she stuck her head in the oven I remember reading her with great admiration and affection while writing a college term paper about her work. Funnily enough, at forty I found her poems and attitude on the childish side. Reply Monika Cooper May 7, 2023 I was a bit older than that and, as can be seen from my other comments, didn’t go as deep as you did. The conversation here, including this comment of yours, has done a lot to soften my image of Plath. Why do you say she believed she’d be rescued? I would love to think that the head-in-the-oven incident was a “cry for help” gone wrong. I feel as if I knew her, from reading The Bell Jar, but didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. It was spooky the way her Bell Jar thoughts slid into step with mine as a young person. And it wasn’t good for me to start thinking her way. James Sale May 2, 2023 Very well done, Brian, and the concluding couplet is especially hard, sharp and fine. I agree with Monika – not a poet to share with impressionable young women, or anybody really; her husband, too, Ted Hughes, was massively overrated in his day, and still is, although the irrelevance and feebleness of his work becomes more transparent day-by-day. Her neurotic feminine hysteria contrasted with his hyper-sexed masculinity made a really ripe pair. This is an excellent critique of her; you might want to complete your coin set! Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much, James! I agree with you regarding Ted Hughes, whose star turn as poet laureate does not seem to me to be earned by the depth of his work. As for his wife… I think Sylvia Plath’s poetry demonstrate a keen intellect, a gifted use of language and form, and considerable talent all in the service of getting her bitterness, anger and depression off her chest. Oddly, there is real depth here. But I tend to think that poetry this upsetting is not the kind of work people will want to read centuries from now. On the other hand, it’s so deeply confessional that some readers may always find it fascinating. Surely there’s a reason I went back to it after a 40+ year hiatus. Reply Roy Eugene Peterson May 2, 2023 This is the second time I have run across Sylvia Plath in poetry on SCP and am so happy I have not deigned to read her works. They sound suffocating and abysmal despite her apparent facility with words and imagery. Your words, “coruscating pen of acid-green” is inspired writing of the highest order, as is the rest of your poem. Brilliantly done as always! Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Roy, thank you so much for your kind words! You’re probably the wise one to not let yourself get brought down by a somewhat poisonous albeit brilliant use of imagery and language. That being said, I think there’s something to be said for being exposed to all sorts of poets simply to broaden your knowledge-base. But, if you do brave some Plath, do so in small doses and in a safe place! Reply Priscilla King May 7, 2023 I’d add “and try to remember that, while she was reacting to the misogyny of the academic and publishing culture of the period, she did actually like men…and sex, and even babies. It was just that mentioning those things got women ghettoized, and while Plath tried to write for women’s magazines too, she’d failed to crack that market.” Joshua C. Frank May 7, 2023 Interesting. Apparently even then, you had to write feminist propaganda if you wanted to be published. I’ve noticed that in TV shows from back then as well. People think the culture started going off the rails in the 1960s… no, the process was going on long before that. Margaret Coats May 2, 2023 You did what, Brian? Good thing she didn’t write much. Like Roy Peterson, I have not read her poetry, except for the two anthologized pieces. I did, as a college student, read the autobiographical novel about her own college experience, where Plath is already unrealistically yet proudly presenting herself as the ever-so-smart, voraciously whining victim we see in so many others. But she is not just a predecessor of xth-wave feminism; she belongs to the sloppy backwash of romanticism: “A poet drowning in romantic grime,” as you say. Your expanded sonnet probably does amusingly bloated justice to her modest poetic corpus that is said to include just about everything she ever wrote. The romantic era is when poets begin to consider all their works too much of the great “me” to be keep anything private. Love how you just cannot choke up a proper couplet from five monorhymed lines! From my point of view, the last of them is a powerful and satisfactory conclusion, but Brian Yapko could not leave poor Sylvia without the “smidge of sympathy” in a slightly more elegiac expression. The nice touch of feeling in your truly final couplet forms a good contrast to bitterness and fatalism, while implying that Plath’s condemnation is her choice. Reply Monika Cooper May 2, 2023 I also have not read much of her poetry but the novel was poison that went down way too easily. Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Monika, I tried to read “The Bell Jar” a long time ago and couldn’t finish it. Yes, it was supposed to have strong insights regarding mental illness, subjective points of view, feminism, etc. But life is rough enough without having to go through the author’s mental breakdown blow by blow. Plath seemed to me like she was edifying her angst — something I find neither inspiring nor illuminating. Margaret Coats May 2, 2023 My own grandmother, still living when I was in college, herself graduated from college in 1913. She was no such prissy miss as Plath, but lived during good times and bad, stayed married for 65+ years, sent her own daughter to college despite family and financial misfortunes, did agricultural labor when necessary, but retired from a distinguished career in local government. Her best creative work (painting) is still treasured. How could I have any respect for a girl with greater privileges, but broken down by suffocating expectations for women in society, and by her own refusals to face reality? Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Margaret, I’m in agreement with you on this. Personally, I’ve gone through the wringer on a number of things in my life which could either have crushed me or which I could use to help build character. I chose the latter. Given this choice, it’s hard to watch Plath romanticize mental suffering and illness. Putting intellectual and professional pride aside and allowing for help may well have made a big difference. Her world view was determinedly unspiritual. Would faith not have helped her? Everything I’ve read about Sylvia Plath confirms that she was a committed atheist. Interestingly, in her journals she makes herself a martyr about it by describing it as necessary yet decrying “the grimness of atheism!” Poor Sylvia indeed. Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much for this detailed comment, Margaret! This was one of those situations where I read a bunch of Plath’s poetry (I still have 40-year old copies of “Ariel” and “Colossus” from college) as I was contemplating giving these books away to Goodwill. After reading through the poems for the first time since college I was both impressed and depressed. But I was also inspired to write about the experience. Here was a poet who used language in a way I had never encountered and rarely still encounter — that “coruscating pen.” So I continue to be impressed by her talent, but approaching her as a now mature man in his 60s, I could not help but feel she was whiny, self-absorbed and gratuitously destructive. This is clearly someone who did not have any type of Higher Power, who believed everything she thought, who thought she was the first person in the world to ever shed a tear. I find it excruciatingly difficult to relate to her — nor would I want to. I love that you appreciated my sequence of monorhymed lines because you understand exactly the effect I was going for — that attempt to come up with something — anything meaningful to say about her suffering. I couldn’t do it and decided to incorporate that poetic frustration into the sonnet, thus “contemporizing” the classical form. As for that smidge of sympathy… she was so obviously suffering that it’s hard not to feel for her. But yes. I do believe it was ultimately her choice. What do they say? Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Reply Monika Cooper May 3, 2023 Yes, faith would have helped her. The passage of “The Bell Jar” I found most haunting was the Sylvia character watching a Catholic mother with a large family from her window, drawn to what she represented, repelled by it: I think, more than anything, afraid of it. Grace would have done tremendous things with her. The saints give us an example of embracing and owning our nothingness, not unto despair, but to rend ourselves and let God’s glory through. Watching the mother from her window, Sylvia felt her nothingness and was afraid of it. She didn’t know what it was good for. Sylvia does haunt me, in a complex way. She almost brought me down with her and one of the main ways she haunts me is as a cautionary figure: ending with her head in an oven. Not everyone needs to contend with her but some do. And she is a powerful enough voice that, from some people, she merits not just dismissal but an answer: your poem, for example. Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 Thank you, Monika, for this deeply sensitive and insightful comment regarding grace and your description of what sounds like a highly evocative scene in “The Bell Jar.” The image of her looking out a window at a happy Catholic family and being walled off from that is so painful. Yes, there are many who will never read Plath, and there are those who will read her and move on, and there are those who must contend with her. I did not realize that I fit into that last category until you brought up the fact that I answered her. It seems in your comments that you have as well. Judged on how readers react to her, Plath presents a most interesting poetic legacy. Joseph S. Salemi May 2, 2023 Even poets whose work we dislike will occasionally produce something good. I love Plath’s poem “Daddy,” because it is an excellent rant-piece and has the wonderful image “and a love of the rack and the screw.” My girlfriend Olivia once said that the best way to read “Daddy” was to consider that overwhelming presence of the rhyme “oo” (you, through, screw, etc.) Olivia said that it was just a manifestation of an angry woman’s tendency to scream “Ooooh!” when she became exasperated and inarticulate. One has to understand Plath as a perfect product of the incipient revolt against the late 1940s and 50s — a revolt that did not really explode until about 1965. The late 40s and 50s were the years of my childhood. Although it was a time of general peace and calm and prosperity in America, there also was a subterranean bubbling of hatred and resentment and sheer contrariness. I could feel it happening — even a child understood that some sort of internal threat hung over us. Plath’s querulous, resentful, and self-absorbed poetry was just one facet of the situation. And she became famous because she represented what many angry persons of both sexes were brooding about. Brian, this is a fine poem, and it encapsulates what Plath was all about. Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much, Joseph, for the kind words and for this insightful comment regarding Plath’s work (as well as that of others whose work may not be a reader’s particular cup of tea.) I really like Olivia’s take on “Daddy” which makes perfect sense. I noticed all those “oooh” sounds but never made an effort to explicate the how and why. I’m also interested in the period of American history that you describe and the bubbling of hatred and resentment that was beginning to crop up. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and the beat poets of the 50s. Also, Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” to which I took an instant dislike. In case anyone wants to read it as an exemplar of Sylvia Plath’s work, I’m going to include a link to “Daddy.” Plath obviously had a neurotic and uniquely unhappy relationship with her father, both live and in memory. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2 Reply Joseph S. Salemi May 2, 2023 All those things you mention were symptomatic of the trouble. My mentor Alfred Dorn was in his twenties during the 1950s, and he spent much time in New York’s Greenwich Village, with its Beat poets, its mannered bohemianism, its off-the-wall eccentricities, and its sexual perversions. And you can ask our own Sally Cook, who was a young painter there during the heyday of abstract expressionism and the Cedar Tavern scene. She’ll confirm what a freak-show it all was. There was a lot of sickness percolating at that time, though it did not blossom into full force until after the assassination of Kennedy, and the coming of age of the Baby Boomer generation. That’s why I gave the year 1965 as a guidepost. Joseph S. Salemi May 3, 2023 Otto Plath was a scholarly entomologist who died when his daughter Sylvia was eight. It’s hard to imagine that his relationship with her was as horrific as the poem “Daddy” makes out. This is why I think that even poems purporting to be “confessional” are more likely fictive artifacts that reflect the poet’s imaginative and verbal skills, more than any lived experience. Poor Otto! He got trouble from the government in World War I just for being a German, and then his daughter immortalizes him as some kind of monster. Priscilla King May 7, 2023 In the fantasy of Freudian psychoanalysis, she was supposed to need to bring to consciousness a great festering “Electra Complex” of a fantasy relationship with a father she hardly even knew. It was not as if he’d done anything worse than dying and leaving her, or she consciously felt that he had. It was that Freud thought that women’s sanity would defined by the Electra Complex, and her contemporaries thought that Plath’s High Sensory Perceptivity was “too” emotional, so (instead of just living through and outgrowing her hormone storms) her adult sanity depended on her ability to make a huge emotional deal out of this hypothetical Electra Complex she probably never really had. It took a *long* time for people to dare to debunk Freud. Monika Cooper May 4, 2023 I wouldn’t say I love (or loved) “Daddy” but it is certainly unforgettable. Thank you for the fascinating background and context you provide here and in your other comments. Reply Cheryl Corey May 2, 2023 Brian, I commend you for your strong constitution, as I could never stomach Plath. Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you, Cheryl. Her work is indeed highly piquant and not for everyone. As I’ve said in other comments, I’m impressed by her dazzling use of imagery and language, but she’s too jarring for me. After re-reading her work this time around, I think I’m done. Reply David Whippman May 2, 2023 Brian, thanks for this skilfully composed poem. In Britain, Plath is often regarded with reference to her husband Ted Hughes. It seems that she suffered from some form of mental illness, and the marriage can’t have helped. Could she have been saved from suicide, or was she, in your words, condemned to lose? Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much for this comment, David. In many ways, I think it’s hard to separate Sylvia Plath from Ted Hughes since so much of her work is reactive to him and their relationship. She did indeed suffer from mental illness — severe depression, I believe. And her novel The Bell Jar documents more or less (roman a clef style) her breakdown and suicide attempt when she was 20 or so. When she finally did succeed in killing herself she was only 30. To be honest, I have no idea what demons she was really tormented by or how she could have been saved. I do believe that those who have a connection to a Higher Power are more likely to get through such challenges. Plath, however, was a committed atheist and a strong believer in her own intellect. The intersection of Hubris and Severe Depression is a dangerous place to live one’s life — especially if one believes everything one thinks. This has become common today and it’s a very difficult state of mind to penetrate. Reply David Whippman May 3, 2023 I certainly think that Hughes must have been a big part of the equation. That’s not to say he was evil, just wrong for her. (Incidentally, his next partner also killed herself. Perhaps he attracted women who were prone to depression? Just conjecture.) You’re right: to believe exclusively in oneself, when that self is beset by despair, is a recipe for tragedy. Jeff Eardley May 2, 2023 Brian, here in England in the 50’s and 60’s, the preferred method of suicide was to “stick your head in a gas oven.” Ms. Plath took advantage of the supply of “Coal gas” that was a lot more lethal than the “Natural gas” of the 70’s when this method of self-destruction declined to pretty much zero. Your poem has inspired me to never read any of her work. Life is miserable enough over here as it is. Another brilliant piece from you today. Thank you. Reply Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you for the kind words, Jeff. How horrible about the commonality of people sticking their heads in gas ovens back in the day! As for reading Plath’s work, as I said to Roy, I do think it’s worthwhile to check out one or two of her poems — they are intellectually brilliant — but to do so in small doses and in a safe place! But you’re right — life is miserable enough over here, too, to engage too much in choosing to read pure bitterness. Reply C.B. Anderson May 2, 2023 Some years ago, Brian, I read Plath’s Collected Works (or something like that), and I was only glad to have found a book in the Concord, MA public library that instantiated a formal approach to poetry. I don’t remember how I reacted to her dismal world-view, and at this point I don’t really care. She wrote what she wrote, and that’s the end of it. On an entirely different tack, I notice that your line “Your lack of faith, your overactive brain” contains an exquisite instance of internal consonance, to wit, the lack/ac resonance. I dare say that this was likely accidental, but who can say? I have found that the longer I write poems, the more these felicitous “accidents” tend to happen. You own your voice, your method, and the means to strike a telling figure on the page. Compare yourself to T.S. Kerrigan. Reply Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 Thank you very much for this comment, C.B. Yes, she wrote what she wrote and all we can do is react. As I go through these comments and look at some more of her poetry I’m finding my own reaction to be quite complex. I can’t be dismissive of her nor can I really let her work in. It’s a bit like seeing a modern painting that is repellant and yet draws me towards it. Thank you also for noticing that internal consonance because I did not! I’m less inclined to call it accidental so much as a subconscious choice that sounded pleasing to my ear without my really analyzing why. Perhaps it is similar to the way musicians develop an ear for harmonies without really analyzing why they choose what they choose. As for the comparison to T.S. Kerrigan — a hearty, enthusiastic thank-you for this introduction to a poet I had not heard of! I looked him up, read through five or six of his poems and really enjoyed them, for their clarity, beauty and originality. Then I looked at his biography and, bizarrely, he went to U.C.L.A. and so did I. And he went to Loyola Law School and so did I. And he’s from L.A. and so am I. He and I have improbably similar backgrounds. Small world. Reply C.B. Anderson May 3, 2023 The mind’s ear, Brian, never lies. By “accidental” I meant unintentional. But, yes, as we grow in experience and master our word-craft, such sonic effects arise spontaneously, reflexively, as it were, where volition and cerebration are muted or switched off entirely. Joshua C. Frank May 2, 2023 I don’t know anything about Sylvia Plath outside of what you’ve already written here, and I’ve never had any interest in reading her work, but I like your poem about her. It’s interesting how you extended the sonnet by adding a 5-line monorhyme between the quatrains and the couplet. I would have thought an extended sonnet would have entailed adding a quatrain or two with the same abab rhyme (as I’ve done in a few poems of mine). Reply Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 Thank you very much, Josh! As I’ve mentioned above, even if you don’t like contemporary poetry or confessional poetry, Sylvia Plath’s talent is formidable and, I think, worth some investigation. I suspect she will not be your cup of tea anymore than she is mine, but you never know. I do know this — I’ve not read another poet with her scathingly brilliant and original use of language and imagery. As for that extension to the sonnet — Margaret’s comment above is a good summation of why I extended it the way I did. I could have gone the route you suggest by adding in an additional quatrain, but that would have addressed content only and I wanted more: I wanted a) to build momentum with rhymes piled on top of each other; b) I wanted to briefly yank the form out of the classical poetry tradition to tacitly acknowledge Plath’s unique use of form; c) I wanted to convey the speaker’s frustration with Plath by starting a series of couplets that I just couldn’t find closure for, ultimately throwing my poetic hands up in the air with “Enough…!” I don’t do it often, but I tried to use form as its own structural comment on content and to play with it a little. I thought it would work for this particular subject. Reply Susan Jarvis Bryant May 2, 2023 Brian, this is a superbly written poem on a poet I studied in my youth – a poet I have pondered on. I love the way you thread the very essence of Plath deftly through your beautifully crafted lines, sweeping this reader up in her lexical sorcery with poetic aplomb. Your wonderfully woven words highlight the title magnificently to the point where I feel I too have binge-read Sylvia and my mind is now swirling with her sickness and exquisite genius. You capture the experience bitingly yet poignantly. Very well done indeed! To me, Plath doesn’t come across as a woman of hubris, or a man-hater, just a sick young woman scorned, wounded of mind, who feels worthless in her role as a single mother and horribly let down by life at a very tender age… an age when one is still growing, still finding out what life means. Her poem “Morning Song” spoke to me after the birth of my son… not every mother (especially if they’ve had an extremely difficult birth) has an instant, all-consuming love for her newborn baby. Plath’s gradual acknowledgement of her child’s wonder was something raw and beautiful to me. It’s honesty reached out to me. For me her poem “Child” speaks of the despair at her inadequacies as a mother. Perhaps post-natal depression added to her already troubled mind. The wonder of your poetry is, it always gets me thinking… deeply – something I love to do and thank you wholeheartedly for. Reply Monika Cooper May 3, 2023 You mention poems I have not read. Sounds like a very different side of Plath. I will have to read and see! Thank you. (I actually didn’t know she ever had a child.) Reply Priscilla King May 7, 2023 Two. And she even wrote cute, silly children’s poems for them, though Hughes and contemporary critics disdained poems that were happy or pretty or even euphonious–from themselves and other poets, not only Plath. (They didn’t even bash contemporaries like Helen Covington or Jane Tyson Clements for “being a poetess.” They took it for granted that nobody thought much of women who wrote non-depressive poems in or close to classical forms.) What now puts me off Plath is the people-pleaser (or, better put, market-driven) quality underneath that “stark” quality the critics liked in her poems. “Flayed by thorns, I trek the rocks” was only one part of her walks on the beach but it was the part that made her poems sell. Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 First off, thank you, Susan, for your generous comments regarding the poem itself. It took a number of incarnations before I felt it was presentable so hearing it described as beautifully crafted means a lot to me. Still, in some ways, I feel like this is an unsatisfactory poem because it filters Plath’s coruscating brilliance through my decidedly uncoruscating personal lens and I fear much is lost in translation. The language in your comment actually does her justice better — as your mind is left “swirling with her sickness and exquisite genius.” I wish I had written that! Like Monika, the Plath you’re describing is a different woman than who I read in Ariel and Colossus. In fact, I’ve just gone to “Morning Song” and read it. Yes, it’s brilliant and honest. To me — just to me — it’s also a little bit scary. It’s not exactly nursery rhyme/lullaby material. I’m really struck by the line “All night your moth- breath/Flickers among the flat pink roses.” “Moth-breath”?? This is not your typical mom crooning to her baby and maybe there is some post-partum depression, though some depression always seems to be the poet’s baseline. But I also like the final line which adds slight whimsy to the mix as she describes her baby crying: “And now you try/Your handful of notes;/The clear vowels rise like balloons.” As with “Daddy,” I’m going to link to this “Morning Song” so that any readers can get a feel for her work and our discussion about this poem. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49008/morning-song-56d22ab4a0cee I appreciate that you find much to admire about Sylvia Plath’s work — as do I. I’m grateful that you’ve taken a few moments to think about her legacy and to offer some meaningful positive insights regarding this troubled, talented poet. Thank you, Susan. Reply Monika Cooper May 4, 2023 So I had read “Morning Song” once upon a time (it’s the one I quoted at the top of the page) but didn’t remember or recognize the title. I don’t think it occurred to me then that it could be about the actual birth of a child of hers. I found out yesterday that of Plath’s two children with Hughes her son committed suicide in 2009 and her daughter is still living. I walked away from Plath pretty decisively after reading The Bell Jar but judging from my deep interest in this conversation, it seems I have unfinished business with her after all. Reply Priscilla King May 7, 2023 I binge-read Plath in college, when Hughes allowed her (incomplete) Collected Poems and Collected Journals to be printed, and again when he died and her children released her complete surviving journals (Hughes burned one). Her High Sensory Perceptivity made her seem like a friend to a lot of HSP girls, but a sad cautionary one. It’s still pleasant to read/remember her felicitous snarky phrases…yes, fevers do take the ear-conscious brain “down where sound comes blunt and wan”… It’s hard to imagine a woman *writer* of her period not feeling the anger she projected onto “Daddy” (and was she really thinking “Teddy”?), at the bigoted intellectual establishment. I never blamed her for that. I’ve just been very very glad and grateful that she and C.S. Lewis (yes, people used to tell me that was a bizarre pair of favorite writers to have) broke some of the barriers against women writers and Christian writers, so that baby-boomers in either category didn’t have to be quite so angry. Well, thanks for letting me add so many comments here. Maybe I should write about her at my own blog 🙂 but it’s GREAT to read a more enlightened set of criticisms of her here, compared to what was published in the 1970s and 1980s. (One of the requirements for a BA in English was a paper that criticized a poet and the previous criticisms of that poet, and was the contemporary criticism of Plath ever easy to bash.) I don’t usually comment on the poems and discussions here, but so far as time permits I do try to read every one. Reply Joseph S. Salemi May 7, 2023 Plath certainly had ambition, and a need to make a name for herself in the poetry world. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, since it is a common trait among creative types. But I do think you are quite correct to point out that she was very conscious of her contemporary audience, and the need to give them what they wanted. This happened to coincide with the heyday of confessionalism (Robert Lowell was still a big name), so everything came together for Plath. Reply ROGER KEIZERSTEIN March 10, 2024 Hi Joseph, You mentioned Alfred Dorn, your mentor. He was my mentor as well, 1975–1978, at Queensboro Community College. What a wonderful man. My father convinced me to go to college by asserting that the great poet Alfred Dorn was teaching there and I would have the opportunity to take his poetry writing class. He introduced me to The Poetry Society of America and his lovely wife Ann. I am writing an autobiographical novel and the last section includes my relationship with Dr. Dorn. Did he actually meet with Sylvia Plath? Did he promote her poetry. My father, now deceased, told me that he knew her. I stopped writing poetry in 1977, concentrating on non-fiction. Any feedback would be appreciated. Monika Cooper May 8, 2023 You wrote: “And she even wrote cute, silly children’s poems for them, though Hughes and contemporary critics disdained poems that were happy or pretty or even euphonious–from themselves and other poets, not only Plath. (They didn’t even bash contemporaries like Helen Covington or Jane Tyson Clements for “being a poetess.” They took it for granted that nobody thought much of women who wrote non-depressive poems in or close to classical forms.)” This is all very interesting. Helen Covington and Jane Tyson are new names to me. I do remember growing up that it was creative writing about depression, drug use, unhealthy relationships, and eating disorders that seemed to get attention from the big world. (I was blessed to be included for a time during high school in a group of writing women who appreciated other themes.) I think of Dr. Salemi’s essay on the site about “Transgression, Fake and Genuine.” Writing joyful, formal poems, light verse, shamelessly pursuing the beautiful in our words can be genuine transgression against what the current (and legacy) establishment prescribes for poetry in general and poetry by women in particular. It’s nice to know you’re reading here. Do you also write poems? Reply Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName* Email* Website Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Δ This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Monika Cooper May 2, 2023 I guess Plath is a prime example of there being more to poetry than form. She had the form but her spirit was anti-poetic. One of my teachers took her line “Love set you going like a fat gold watch” and noted how her hatred for everything she named in that line was palpable. “The real poet loves gold, loves watches, loves fatness, and loves love.” Binge reading her would be exhausting. I especially wouldn’t recommend it for an impressionable young woman. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you for commenting, Monika. Binge-reading her is indeed exhausting, though I confess to having previously read most of these works (the collections “Ariel” and “Colossus”) in 1980 or so when I was in college and they were taught in an American poetry course. At the time I was impressed by what I saw as Plath’s uniquely iconoclastic voice and her sophisticated facility with language. Now I’m stunned by how modern she seems as a contemporary, non-classical poet (she was quite influential), how narcissistic she was (it’s always ALL about her) and how sad it is that she felt it necessary to confess so much pain to the world. Over 40 years after I first read her, I now see her work as dark, angry and depressed. Yet her language and imagery are incredible. She had great talent but one does not turn to Sylvia Plath for a little light reading. Reply
Mary Gardner May 2, 2023 Exhausting is right, Monika. Being unfamiliar with Ms. Plath’s work, I found and read two of her poems – and wished I hadn’t. How did she get published? She was apparently a bitter woman. Bryan, your poem is excellent, “with not one word inert.” Thank you for the read. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much indeed, Mary. Her work really does sizzle in a way — a brilliant but most unpleasant way. I suspect history will regard Sylvia Plath’s bitterness as her superpower. As for how she got published, I think Dr. Salemi’s interesting comment below describing the sociology of the late 50s and early 60s is illuminating. Somehow, Plath tapped into the zeitgeist of an era teeming with anger just below the surface waiting to erupt.
Priscilla King May 7, 2023 Ah, but it worked for my roommate and me! At 17 and 18 we were capable of appreciating her skills and noting where she went wrong… * thinking that “attitude was all” * believing in the “miracles” of drugs * believing that consonance, readability, cheerfulness, and whimsicality were weaknesses (“the art of being a poetess”) and that she needed to write more “masculine” things, like Ted Hughes * believing premarital intercourse was liberating * snorting cocaine to unclog her sinuses, even if a doctor recommended it (Yes, one did!) * believing she needed to get Hughes back rather than dump him * and, worst of all, believing she’d be rescued before significant damage was done when she stuck her head in the oven I remember reading her with great admiration and affection while writing a college term paper about her work. Funnily enough, at forty I found her poems and attitude on the childish side. Reply
Monika Cooper May 7, 2023 I was a bit older than that and, as can be seen from my other comments, didn’t go as deep as you did. The conversation here, including this comment of yours, has done a lot to soften my image of Plath. Why do you say she believed she’d be rescued? I would love to think that the head-in-the-oven incident was a “cry for help” gone wrong. I feel as if I knew her, from reading The Bell Jar, but didn’t know her as well as I thought I did. It was spooky the way her Bell Jar thoughts slid into step with mine as a young person. And it wasn’t good for me to start thinking her way.
James Sale May 2, 2023 Very well done, Brian, and the concluding couplet is especially hard, sharp and fine. I agree with Monika – not a poet to share with impressionable young women, or anybody really; her husband, too, Ted Hughes, was massively overrated in his day, and still is, although the irrelevance and feebleness of his work becomes more transparent day-by-day. Her neurotic feminine hysteria contrasted with his hyper-sexed masculinity made a really ripe pair. This is an excellent critique of her; you might want to complete your coin set! Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much, James! I agree with you regarding Ted Hughes, whose star turn as poet laureate does not seem to me to be earned by the depth of his work. As for his wife… I think Sylvia Plath’s poetry demonstrate a keen intellect, a gifted use of language and form, and considerable talent all in the service of getting her bitterness, anger and depression off her chest. Oddly, there is real depth here. But I tend to think that poetry this upsetting is not the kind of work people will want to read centuries from now. On the other hand, it’s so deeply confessional that some readers may always find it fascinating. Surely there’s a reason I went back to it after a 40+ year hiatus. Reply
Roy Eugene Peterson May 2, 2023 This is the second time I have run across Sylvia Plath in poetry on SCP and am so happy I have not deigned to read her works. They sound suffocating and abysmal despite her apparent facility with words and imagery. Your words, “coruscating pen of acid-green” is inspired writing of the highest order, as is the rest of your poem. Brilliantly done as always! Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Roy, thank you so much for your kind words! You’re probably the wise one to not let yourself get brought down by a somewhat poisonous albeit brilliant use of imagery and language. That being said, I think there’s something to be said for being exposed to all sorts of poets simply to broaden your knowledge-base. But, if you do brave some Plath, do so in small doses and in a safe place! Reply
Priscilla King May 7, 2023 I’d add “and try to remember that, while she was reacting to the misogyny of the academic and publishing culture of the period, she did actually like men…and sex, and even babies. It was just that mentioning those things got women ghettoized, and while Plath tried to write for women’s magazines too, she’d failed to crack that market.”
Joshua C. Frank May 7, 2023 Interesting. Apparently even then, you had to write feminist propaganda if you wanted to be published. I’ve noticed that in TV shows from back then as well. People think the culture started going off the rails in the 1960s… no, the process was going on long before that.
Margaret Coats May 2, 2023 You did what, Brian? Good thing she didn’t write much. Like Roy Peterson, I have not read her poetry, except for the two anthologized pieces. I did, as a college student, read the autobiographical novel about her own college experience, where Plath is already unrealistically yet proudly presenting herself as the ever-so-smart, voraciously whining victim we see in so many others. But she is not just a predecessor of xth-wave feminism; she belongs to the sloppy backwash of romanticism: “A poet drowning in romantic grime,” as you say. Your expanded sonnet probably does amusingly bloated justice to her modest poetic corpus that is said to include just about everything she ever wrote. The romantic era is when poets begin to consider all their works too much of the great “me” to be keep anything private. Love how you just cannot choke up a proper couplet from five monorhymed lines! From my point of view, the last of them is a powerful and satisfactory conclusion, but Brian Yapko could not leave poor Sylvia without the “smidge of sympathy” in a slightly more elegiac expression. The nice touch of feeling in your truly final couplet forms a good contrast to bitterness and fatalism, while implying that Plath’s condemnation is her choice. Reply
Monika Cooper May 2, 2023 I also have not read much of her poetry but the novel was poison that went down way too easily. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Monika, I tried to read “The Bell Jar” a long time ago and couldn’t finish it. Yes, it was supposed to have strong insights regarding mental illness, subjective points of view, feminism, etc. But life is rough enough without having to go through the author’s mental breakdown blow by blow. Plath seemed to me like she was edifying her angst — something I find neither inspiring nor illuminating.
Margaret Coats May 2, 2023 My own grandmother, still living when I was in college, herself graduated from college in 1913. She was no such prissy miss as Plath, but lived during good times and bad, stayed married for 65+ years, sent her own daughter to college despite family and financial misfortunes, did agricultural labor when necessary, but retired from a distinguished career in local government. Her best creative work (painting) is still treasured. How could I have any respect for a girl with greater privileges, but broken down by suffocating expectations for women in society, and by her own refusals to face reality? Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Margaret, I’m in agreement with you on this. Personally, I’ve gone through the wringer on a number of things in my life which could either have crushed me or which I could use to help build character. I chose the latter. Given this choice, it’s hard to watch Plath romanticize mental suffering and illness. Putting intellectual and professional pride aside and allowing for help may well have made a big difference. Her world view was determinedly unspiritual. Would faith not have helped her? Everything I’ve read about Sylvia Plath confirms that she was a committed atheist. Interestingly, in her journals she makes herself a martyr about it by describing it as necessary yet decrying “the grimness of atheism!” Poor Sylvia indeed.
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much for this detailed comment, Margaret! This was one of those situations where I read a bunch of Plath’s poetry (I still have 40-year old copies of “Ariel” and “Colossus” from college) as I was contemplating giving these books away to Goodwill. After reading through the poems for the first time since college I was both impressed and depressed. But I was also inspired to write about the experience. Here was a poet who used language in a way I had never encountered and rarely still encounter — that “coruscating pen.” So I continue to be impressed by her talent, but approaching her as a now mature man in his 60s, I could not help but feel she was whiny, self-absorbed and gratuitously destructive. This is clearly someone who did not have any type of Higher Power, who believed everything she thought, who thought she was the first person in the world to ever shed a tear. I find it excruciatingly difficult to relate to her — nor would I want to. I love that you appreciated my sequence of monorhymed lines because you understand exactly the effect I was going for — that attempt to come up with something — anything meaningful to say about her suffering. I couldn’t do it and decided to incorporate that poetic frustration into the sonnet, thus “contemporizing” the classical form. As for that smidge of sympathy… she was so obviously suffering that it’s hard not to feel for her. But yes. I do believe it was ultimately her choice. What do they say? Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. Reply
Monika Cooper May 3, 2023 Yes, faith would have helped her. The passage of “The Bell Jar” I found most haunting was the Sylvia character watching a Catholic mother with a large family from her window, drawn to what she represented, repelled by it: I think, more than anything, afraid of it. Grace would have done tremendous things with her. The saints give us an example of embracing and owning our nothingness, not unto despair, but to rend ourselves and let God’s glory through. Watching the mother from her window, Sylvia felt her nothingness and was afraid of it. She didn’t know what it was good for. Sylvia does haunt me, in a complex way. She almost brought me down with her and one of the main ways she haunts me is as a cautionary figure: ending with her head in an oven. Not everyone needs to contend with her but some do. And she is a powerful enough voice that, from some people, she merits not just dismissal but an answer: your poem, for example.
Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 Thank you, Monika, for this deeply sensitive and insightful comment regarding grace and your description of what sounds like a highly evocative scene in “The Bell Jar.” The image of her looking out a window at a happy Catholic family and being walled off from that is so painful. Yes, there are many who will never read Plath, and there are those who will read her and move on, and there are those who must contend with her. I did not realize that I fit into that last category until you brought up the fact that I answered her. It seems in your comments that you have as well. Judged on how readers react to her, Plath presents a most interesting poetic legacy.
Joseph S. Salemi May 2, 2023 Even poets whose work we dislike will occasionally produce something good. I love Plath’s poem “Daddy,” because it is an excellent rant-piece and has the wonderful image “and a love of the rack and the screw.” My girlfriend Olivia once said that the best way to read “Daddy” was to consider that overwhelming presence of the rhyme “oo” (you, through, screw, etc.) Olivia said that it was just a manifestation of an angry woman’s tendency to scream “Ooooh!” when she became exasperated and inarticulate. One has to understand Plath as a perfect product of the incipient revolt against the late 1940s and 50s — a revolt that did not really explode until about 1965. The late 40s and 50s were the years of my childhood. Although it was a time of general peace and calm and prosperity in America, there also was a subterranean bubbling of hatred and resentment and sheer contrariness. I could feel it happening — even a child understood that some sort of internal threat hung over us. Plath’s querulous, resentful, and self-absorbed poetry was just one facet of the situation. And she became famous because she represented what many angry persons of both sexes were brooding about. Brian, this is a fine poem, and it encapsulates what Plath was all about. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much, Joseph, for the kind words and for this insightful comment regarding Plath’s work (as well as that of others whose work may not be a reader’s particular cup of tea.) I really like Olivia’s take on “Daddy” which makes perfect sense. I noticed all those “oooh” sounds but never made an effort to explicate the how and why. I’m also interested in the period of American history that you describe and the bubbling of hatred and resentment that was beginning to crop up. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and the beat poets of the 50s. Also, Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” to which I took an instant dislike. In case anyone wants to read it as an exemplar of Sylvia Plath’s work, I’m going to include a link to “Daddy.” Plath obviously had a neurotic and uniquely unhappy relationship with her father, both live and in memory. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2 Reply
Joseph S. Salemi May 2, 2023 All those things you mention were symptomatic of the trouble. My mentor Alfred Dorn was in his twenties during the 1950s, and he spent much time in New York’s Greenwich Village, with its Beat poets, its mannered bohemianism, its off-the-wall eccentricities, and its sexual perversions. And you can ask our own Sally Cook, who was a young painter there during the heyday of abstract expressionism and the Cedar Tavern scene. She’ll confirm what a freak-show it all was. There was a lot of sickness percolating at that time, though it did not blossom into full force until after the assassination of Kennedy, and the coming of age of the Baby Boomer generation. That’s why I gave the year 1965 as a guidepost.
Joseph S. Salemi May 3, 2023 Otto Plath was a scholarly entomologist who died when his daughter Sylvia was eight. It’s hard to imagine that his relationship with her was as horrific as the poem “Daddy” makes out. This is why I think that even poems purporting to be “confessional” are more likely fictive artifacts that reflect the poet’s imaginative and verbal skills, more than any lived experience. Poor Otto! He got trouble from the government in World War I just for being a German, and then his daughter immortalizes him as some kind of monster.
Priscilla King May 7, 2023 In the fantasy of Freudian psychoanalysis, she was supposed to need to bring to consciousness a great festering “Electra Complex” of a fantasy relationship with a father she hardly even knew. It was not as if he’d done anything worse than dying and leaving her, or she consciously felt that he had. It was that Freud thought that women’s sanity would defined by the Electra Complex, and her contemporaries thought that Plath’s High Sensory Perceptivity was “too” emotional, so (instead of just living through and outgrowing her hormone storms) her adult sanity depended on her ability to make a huge emotional deal out of this hypothetical Electra Complex she probably never really had. It took a *long* time for people to dare to debunk Freud.
Monika Cooper May 4, 2023 I wouldn’t say I love (or loved) “Daddy” but it is certainly unforgettable. Thank you for the fascinating background and context you provide here and in your other comments. Reply
Cheryl Corey May 2, 2023 Brian, I commend you for your strong constitution, as I could never stomach Plath. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you, Cheryl. Her work is indeed highly piquant and not for everyone. As I’ve said in other comments, I’m impressed by her dazzling use of imagery and language, but she’s too jarring for me. After re-reading her work this time around, I think I’m done. Reply
David Whippman May 2, 2023 Brian, thanks for this skilfully composed poem. In Britain, Plath is often regarded with reference to her husband Ted Hughes. It seems that she suffered from some form of mental illness, and the marriage can’t have helped. Could she have been saved from suicide, or was she, in your words, condemned to lose? Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you very much for this comment, David. In many ways, I think it’s hard to separate Sylvia Plath from Ted Hughes since so much of her work is reactive to him and their relationship. She did indeed suffer from mental illness — severe depression, I believe. And her novel The Bell Jar documents more or less (roman a clef style) her breakdown and suicide attempt when she was 20 or so. When she finally did succeed in killing herself she was only 30. To be honest, I have no idea what demons she was really tormented by or how she could have been saved. I do believe that those who have a connection to a Higher Power are more likely to get through such challenges. Plath, however, was a committed atheist and a strong believer in her own intellect. The intersection of Hubris and Severe Depression is a dangerous place to live one’s life — especially if one believes everything one thinks. This has become common today and it’s a very difficult state of mind to penetrate. Reply
David Whippman May 3, 2023 I certainly think that Hughes must have been a big part of the equation. That’s not to say he was evil, just wrong for her. (Incidentally, his next partner also killed herself. Perhaps he attracted women who were prone to depression? Just conjecture.) You’re right: to believe exclusively in oneself, when that self is beset by despair, is a recipe for tragedy.
Jeff Eardley May 2, 2023 Brian, here in England in the 50’s and 60’s, the preferred method of suicide was to “stick your head in a gas oven.” Ms. Plath took advantage of the supply of “Coal gas” that was a lot more lethal than the “Natural gas” of the 70’s when this method of self-destruction declined to pretty much zero. Your poem has inspired me to never read any of her work. Life is miserable enough over here as it is. Another brilliant piece from you today. Thank you. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 2, 2023 Thank you for the kind words, Jeff. How horrible about the commonality of people sticking their heads in gas ovens back in the day! As for reading Plath’s work, as I said to Roy, I do think it’s worthwhile to check out one or two of her poems — they are intellectually brilliant — but to do so in small doses and in a safe place! But you’re right — life is miserable enough over here, too, to engage too much in choosing to read pure bitterness. Reply
C.B. Anderson May 2, 2023 Some years ago, Brian, I read Plath’s Collected Works (or something like that), and I was only glad to have found a book in the Concord, MA public library that instantiated a formal approach to poetry. I don’t remember how I reacted to her dismal world-view, and at this point I don’t really care. She wrote what she wrote, and that’s the end of it. On an entirely different tack, I notice that your line “Your lack of faith, your overactive brain” contains an exquisite instance of internal consonance, to wit, the lack/ac resonance. I dare say that this was likely accidental, but who can say? I have found that the longer I write poems, the more these felicitous “accidents” tend to happen. You own your voice, your method, and the means to strike a telling figure on the page. Compare yourself to T.S. Kerrigan. Reply
Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 Thank you very much for this comment, C.B. Yes, she wrote what she wrote and all we can do is react. As I go through these comments and look at some more of her poetry I’m finding my own reaction to be quite complex. I can’t be dismissive of her nor can I really let her work in. It’s a bit like seeing a modern painting that is repellant and yet draws me towards it. Thank you also for noticing that internal consonance because I did not! I’m less inclined to call it accidental so much as a subconscious choice that sounded pleasing to my ear without my really analyzing why. Perhaps it is similar to the way musicians develop an ear for harmonies without really analyzing why they choose what they choose. As for the comparison to T.S. Kerrigan — a hearty, enthusiastic thank-you for this introduction to a poet I had not heard of! I looked him up, read through five or six of his poems and really enjoyed them, for their clarity, beauty and originality. Then I looked at his biography and, bizarrely, he went to U.C.L.A. and so did I. And he went to Loyola Law School and so did I. And he’s from L.A. and so am I. He and I have improbably similar backgrounds. Small world. Reply
C.B. Anderson May 3, 2023 The mind’s ear, Brian, never lies. By “accidental” I meant unintentional. But, yes, as we grow in experience and master our word-craft, such sonic effects arise spontaneously, reflexively, as it were, where volition and cerebration are muted or switched off entirely.
Joshua C. Frank May 2, 2023 I don’t know anything about Sylvia Plath outside of what you’ve already written here, and I’ve never had any interest in reading her work, but I like your poem about her. It’s interesting how you extended the sonnet by adding a 5-line monorhyme between the quatrains and the couplet. I would have thought an extended sonnet would have entailed adding a quatrain or two with the same abab rhyme (as I’ve done in a few poems of mine). Reply
Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 Thank you very much, Josh! As I’ve mentioned above, even if you don’t like contemporary poetry or confessional poetry, Sylvia Plath’s talent is formidable and, I think, worth some investigation. I suspect she will not be your cup of tea anymore than she is mine, but you never know. I do know this — I’ve not read another poet with her scathingly brilliant and original use of language and imagery. As for that extension to the sonnet — Margaret’s comment above is a good summation of why I extended it the way I did. I could have gone the route you suggest by adding in an additional quatrain, but that would have addressed content only and I wanted more: I wanted a) to build momentum with rhymes piled on top of each other; b) I wanted to briefly yank the form out of the classical poetry tradition to tacitly acknowledge Plath’s unique use of form; c) I wanted to convey the speaker’s frustration with Plath by starting a series of couplets that I just couldn’t find closure for, ultimately throwing my poetic hands up in the air with “Enough…!” I don’t do it often, but I tried to use form as its own structural comment on content and to play with it a little. I thought it would work for this particular subject. Reply
Susan Jarvis Bryant May 2, 2023 Brian, this is a superbly written poem on a poet I studied in my youth – a poet I have pondered on. I love the way you thread the very essence of Plath deftly through your beautifully crafted lines, sweeping this reader up in her lexical sorcery with poetic aplomb. Your wonderfully woven words highlight the title magnificently to the point where I feel I too have binge-read Sylvia and my mind is now swirling with her sickness and exquisite genius. You capture the experience bitingly yet poignantly. Very well done indeed! To me, Plath doesn’t come across as a woman of hubris, or a man-hater, just a sick young woman scorned, wounded of mind, who feels worthless in her role as a single mother and horribly let down by life at a very tender age… an age when one is still growing, still finding out what life means. Her poem “Morning Song” spoke to me after the birth of my son… not every mother (especially if they’ve had an extremely difficult birth) has an instant, all-consuming love for her newborn baby. Plath’s gradual acknowledgement of her child’s wonder was something raw and beautiful to me. It’s honesty reached out to me. For me her poem “Child” speaks of the despair at her inadequacies as a mother. Perhaps post-natal depression added to her already troubled mind. The wonder of your poetry is, it always gets me thinking… deeply – something I love to do and thank you wholeheartedly for. Reply
Monika Cooper May 3, 2023 You mention poems I have not read. Sounds like a very different side of Plath. I will have to read and see! Thank you. (I actually didn’t know she ever had a child.) Reply
Priscilla King May 7, 2023 Two. And she even wrote cute, silly children’s poems for them, though Hughes and contemporary critics disdained poems that were happy or pretty or even euphonious–from themselves and other poets, not only Plath. (They didn’t even bash contemporaries like Helen Covington or Jane Tyson Clements for “being a poetess.” They took it for granted that nobody thought much of women who wrote non-depressive poems in or close to classical forms.) What now puts me off Plath is the people-pleaser (or, better put, market-driven) quality underneath that “stark” quality the critics liked in her poems. “Flayed by thorns, I trek the rocks” was only one part of her walks on the beach but it was the part that made her poems sell.
Brian A Yapko May 3, 2023 First off, thank you, Susan, for your generous comments regarding the poem itself. It took a number of incarnations before I felt it was presentable so hearing it described as beautifully crafted means a lot to me. Still, in some ways, I feel like this is an unsatisfactory poem because it filters Plath’s coruscating brilliance through my decidedly uncoruscating personal lens and I fear much is lost in translation. The language in your comment actually does her justice better — as your mind is left “swirling with her sickness and exquisite genius.” I wish I had written that! Like Monika, the Plath you’re describing is a different woman than who I read in Ariel and Colossus. In fact, I’ve just gone to “Morning Song” and read it. Yes, it’s brilliant and honest. To me — just to me — it’s also a little bit scary. It’s not exactly nursery rhyme/lullaby material. I’m really struck by the line “All night your moth- breath/Flickers among the flat pink roses.” “Moth-breath”?? This is not your typical mom crooning to her baby and maybe there is some post-partum depression, though some depression always seems to be the poet’s baseline. But I also like the final line which adds slight whimsy to the mix as she describes her baby crying: “And now you try/Your handful of notes;/The clear vowels rise like balloons.” As with “Daddy,” I’m going to link to this “Morning Song” so that any readers can get a feel for her work and our discussion about this poem. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49008/morning-song-56d22ab4a0cee I appreciate that you find much to admire about Sylvia Plath’s work — as do I. I’m grateful that you’ve taken a few moments to think about her legacy and to offer some meaningful positive insights regarding this troubled, talented poet. Thank you, Susan. Reply
Monika Cooper May 4, 2023 So I had read “Morning Song” once upon a time (it’s the one I quoted at the top of the page) but didn’t remember or recognize the title. I don’t think it occurred to me then that it could be about the actual birth of a child of hers. I found out yesterday that of Plath’s two children with Hughes her son committed suicide in 2009 and her daughter is still living. I walked away from Plath pretty decisively after reading The Bell Jar but judging from my deep interest in this conversation, it seems I have unfinished business with her after all. Reply
Priscilla King May 7, 2023 I binge-read Plath in college, when Hughes allowed her (incomplete) Collected Poems and Collected Journals to be printed, and again when he died and her children released her complete surviving journals (Hughes burned one). Her High Sensory Perceptivity made her seem like a friend to a lot of HSP girls, but a sad cautionary one. It’s still pleasant to read/remember her felicitous snarky phrases…yes, fevers do take the ear-conscious brain “down where sound comes blunt and wan”… It’s hard to imagine a woman *writer* of her period not feeling the anger she projected onto “Daddy” (and was she really thinking “Teddy”?), at the bigoted intellectual establishment. I never blamed her for that. I’ve just been very very glad and grateful that she and C.S. Lewis (yes, people used to tell me that was a bizarre pair of favorite writers to have) broke some of the barriers against women writers and Christian writers, so that baby-boomers in either category didn’t have to be quite so angry. Well, thanks for letting me add so many comments here. Maybe I should write about her at my own blog 🙂 but it’s GREAT to read a more enlightened set of criticisms of her here, compared to what was published in the 1970s and 1980s. (One of the requirements for a BA in English was a paper that criticized a poet and the previous criticisms of that poet, and was the contemporary criticism of Plath ever easy to bash.) I don’t usually comment on the poems and discussions here, but so far as time permits I do try to read every one. Reply
Joseph S. Salemi May 7, 2023 Plath certainly had ambition, and a need to make a name for herself in the poetry world. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, since it is a common trait among creative types. But I do think you are quite correct to point out that she was very conscious of her contemporary audience, and the need to give them what they wanted. This happened to coincide with the heyday of confessionalism (Robert Lowell was still a big name), so everything came together for Plath. Reply
ROGER KEIZERSTEIN March 10, 2024 Hi Joseph, You mentioned Alfred Dorn, your mentor. He was my mentor as well, 1975–1978, at Queensboro Community College. What a wonderful man. My father convinced me to go to college by asserting that the great poet Alfred Dorn was teaching there and I would have the opportunity to take his poetry writing class. He introduced me to The Poetry Society of America and his lovely wife Ann. I am writing an autobiographical novel and the last section includes my relationship with Dr. Dorn. Did he actually meet with Sylvia Plath? Did he promote her poetry. My father, now deceased, told me that he knew her. I stopped writing poetry in 1977, concentrating on non-fiction. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Monika Cooper May 8, 2023 You wrote: “And she even wrote cute, silly children’s poems for them, though Hughes and contemporary critics disdained poems that were happy or pretty or even euphonious–from themselves and other poets, not only Plath. (They didn’t even bash contemporaries like Helen Covington or Jane Tyson Clements for “being a poetess.” They took it for granted that nobody thought much of women who wrote non-depressive poems in or close to classical forms.)” This is all very interesting. Helen Covington and Jane Tyson are new names to me. I do remember growing up that it was creative writing about depression, drug use, unhealthy relationships, and eating disorders that seemed to get attention from the big world. (I was blessed to be included for a time during high school in a group of writing women who appreciated other themes.) I think of Dr. Salemi’s essay on the site about “Transgression, Fake and Genuine.” Writing joyful, formal poems, light verse, shamelessly pursuing the beautiful in our words can be genuine transgression against what the current (and legacy) establishment prescribes for poetry in general and poetry by women in particular. It’s nice to know you’re reading here. Do you also write poems? Reply
