Collected Poems

"There will be people who disagree quite strongly with what I’m about to say . . . What Plath most often wrestles with is a sense that, as the metaphor of a bell jar suggests, she’s seeing the world through glass. She’s trapped. She’s constrained. She knows that there’s something greater within her, but it can’t break through. She’s struggling; she’s puzzled. To borrow one of her titles as a metaphor, she’s writing ‘stillborn’ poems. Scholars like Christina Britzolakis have written powerfully about why they think that this breakthrough narrative isn’t appropriate, but it seems right to me, and it’s Plath’s own language to describe her development as a poet. It’s always seemed to me that Plath develops in fits and starts. There’s no kind of linear progression; she goes through phases. She’ll try out one style for a period, and then she’ll fall silent, and then she’ll try out another one and fall silent. Like any apprentice poet, she’s experimenting, casting off styles as she goes. This even happens in the last year of her life. One of the great things about Collected Poems is that you can see exactly—to the day—when each poem was written. You can say, ‘Oh, that group of five poems goes together; they were all written in a week, and have this motif or image in common.’ “It’s always seemed to me that Plath develops in fits and starts” An obvious case is those 1963 poems, which are very, very different from the 1962 poems we normally think of as the ‘ Ariel voice.’ Compare ‘Ariel’ with ‘Sheep in Fog’, for example: they’re both poems about riding a horse on Dartmoor. Yet ‘Ariel’ is about accelerating into the red heat of the sun. It’s all passion and speed; it starts with stasis in darkness and ends with suicidal recklessness. A poem like ‘Sheep in Fog’ is the aftermath of that horse ride. She’s going back to a stable. It’s cold. There’s a sense of defeat, of despondency. It’s all over. There’s no rebirth, no energy. So, much like we think of an artist like Picasso casting off styles in different periods, Plath goes through phases of development. It happens in a very quick way. Really, there is no single ’ Ariel style’, but four or five distinctive phases within it. The fundamental drama of so many of her poems comes from the isolated speaker being immersed in an alien landscape, what that landscape is doing to her, and how she interacts with it. The landscapes gradually become mindscapes and bodyscapes—or at least, the reader can no longer tell the difference. “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. / The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.” Are we in Plath’s mind? Are we in a physical place? On one hand, she’s clearly engaging with British Romanticism. You can’t really think about landscape without thinking about Wordsworth. But she’s also coming out of an American tradition: she has read Emerson, and she’s interested in the relationship between the seeing eye and nature; whether nature is benign, as Emerson might argue, because it is the work of God; whether you might receive illumination from it; or whether it’s potentially threatening and malign. Eyes in Plath are very often damaged or blind. You’ll notice ‘Ariel’ ends with “the drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning.” Even the sun gets an arrow in its eye, Harold-like, at that point. Remember the Journals : the fascinated horror of seeing Percy Key in his deteriorated state, with her description of his eyes’ clotted pus. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Landscape is an element of continuity within Plath’s work. In any given period, there will always be a poem in which a speaker engages with, or is threatened or assaulted by, the landscape. “The horizons ring me like faggots” : her persona is encircled by landscape, which has the potential here to burn her up. Plath, I think, is much more interested in landscapes than most of the poets she’s often compared with—Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, for example. And Hughes’s relationship with nature is importantly different from Plath’s. When Plath positions herself in the landscape, she’s vulnerable in a way that Hughes’s predators really aren’t. Hughes is interested almost always in predators; Plath is sometimes interested in the prey—the pheasant which may get shot, the rabbits strangled by snares—and the prey may turn out to be herself. I love Berryman. You’re right to think of Berryman, but the relationship with Heaney is intriguing. Heaney, who is the most generous of readers, a celebrant who very rarely has a bad word to say about any poet at all—and yet one of the very few poets he criticizes is Sylvia Plath. “Plath is dramatizing the Electra complex” He praised her technique, acknowledging that “there is nothing poetically flawed about Plath’s work”, but in the end he couldn’t allow the references to Jewishness in a poem like ‘Daddy’, for example. He writes that though the poem is a “ tour de force ”, it “rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy.” I think he’s got it wrong, not least because he thinks that the poem is interested in winning his sympathy. He’s thinking of the ‘I’ in ‘Daddy’ as Plath writing in propria persona , but actually, the poem is another dramatic monologue. Plath is dramatizing the Electra complex: there’s supposed to be something absurd and ridiculous about the father being a Nazi and the mother a Jew. She is. It’s no good to write a racist poem, for example, only to claim, ‘Oh, but no, I’m not the speaker!’ That’s not quite what Plath’s doing. I think there’s something more sophisticated going on in ‘Daddy’. She’s depicting a psychodrama of extremity. The story goes that she read ‘Daddy’ aloud to her friend Clarissa Roche, and they ended up in gales of laughter. Of course, one of the poem’s joys is that it deals with these taboo subjects through nursery-like rhythms and rhymes. ‘Daddy’ is made up of the ‘-oo’ rhyme (“You do not do, you do not d o ”) and the “-ck” rhyme (“freakish Atlant ic ”, “My Pola ck friend”). These two rhymes are of infantile pleasure and of disgust. Through the play of the two rhymes, you have the Electra complex, the love/hate relationship with the father. Of course, there are also other poems that handle the subject of the Holocaust more sensitively, like ‘Mary’s Song’, which I think is one of Plath’s greatest lyric poems. That said, I’m not sure that Heaney’s case for the prosecution is quite nuanced enough to take into account the complexities of ‘Daddy’. Not at all. I need to be careful what I say here, but I think there’s something gendered about these responses. Here we have Plath coming along and talking about particular issues relating to women’s experience and women’s suffering, and we have male responses that consider these subjects embarrassing or inappropriate. Not that Plath usually wanted to present herself as a victim, but often her subject is women’s victimhood by men and patriarchy—not merely by individual men (like a husband or father), but by a whole apparatus (like the industrialized war machine, which she opposed late in her life by supporting ‘Ban the Bomb’ marches). ‘Mary’s Song’ expresses very clearly the fact of the maternal experience being driven over, and written over, by these male, patriarchal, brutish and brutal war machines. The male poets who treated the writing of women’s experiences from these perspectives as somehow improper unintentionally put their finger on the problem."