I have not read The Bell Jar, a novel that Sylvia Plath published under the name of Victoria Lucas. The rest of her work consists of two volumes of poems: The Colossus, first published in England in 1960, and Ariel, published in London in the spring of 1965, two years after her death, together with a number of poems first printed in Encounter. Some of these have not been included in the posthumous collection.
It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylan Thomas’ Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as has Ariel. Sylvia Plath’s last poems have already passed into legend as both representative of our present tone of emotional life and unique in their implacable, harsh brilliance. Those among the young who read new poetry will know “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Death & Co.” almost by heart, and reference to Sylvia Plath is constant where poetry and the conditions of its present existence are discussed.
The spell does not lie wholly in the poems themselves. The suicide of Sylvia Plath at the age of thirty-one in 1963, and the personality of this young woman who had come from Massachusetts to study and live in England (where she married Ted Hughes, himself a gifted poet), are vital parts of it. To those who knew her and to the greatly enlarged circle who were electrified by her last poems and sudden death, she had come to signify the specific honesties and risks of the poet’s condition. Her personal style, and the price in private harrowing she so obviously paid to achieve the intensity and candor of her principal poems, have taken on their own dramatic authority.
All this makes it difficult to judge the poems. I mean that the vehemence and intimacy of the verse is such as to constitute a very powerful rhetoric of sincerity. The poems play on our nerves with their own proud nakedness, making claims so immediate and sharply urged that the reader flinches, embarrassed by the routine discretions and evasions of his own sensibility. Yet if these poems are to take life among us, if they are to be more than exhibits in the history of modern psychological stress, they must be read with all the intelligence and scruple we can muster. They are too honest, they have cost too much, to be yielded to myth.
One of the most striking poems in Colossus, “All the Dead Dears,” tells of a skeleton in the Cambridge museum of classical antiquities:
How they grip us through thin and thick,
These barnacle dead!
This lady here’s no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she’ll suck
Blood and whistle my marrow clean
To prove it. As I think now of her head,
From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
Reach hag hands to haul me in,
And an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair—
On a small scale, the lines illustrate a good deal of Sylvia Plath’s tactics and syntax of feeling. The short lines are paced with delicate, seemingly offhand control. The half-rhymes, cross-rhymes, and alliterations give tautness to what might otherwise appear an arbitrary measure. The allusion to The Duchess of Malfi (“When I look into the fish-pond in my garden, / Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake”) is nicely judged. The motifs touched on are those which organize much of Sylvia Plath’s poetry: the generation of women knit by blood and death, the dead reaching out to haul the living into their shadowy vortex, the personage of the father somehow sinister and ineffectual, the poet literally bled and whistled clean by the cruel, intricate quality of felt life.
“Watercolour of Grantchester Meadows” is explicitly conventional in setting and tone. But at the close, this version of pastoral deflects abruptly into darkness and muted hysteria:
Droll, vegetarian, the water rat
Saws down a reed and swims from his limber grove,
While the students stroll or sit,
Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love—
Black-gowned, but unaware
How in such mild air
The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.
The black gowns, which are merely the ordinary garb of the Cambridge undergraduate, are so placed as to alert the reader to mourning; the vegetarian cries out under the sudden beak of the carnivore. One recognizes the props: the moon, the reed-fringed water, the owl and turret. They are a part of that Gothic strain which is so constant beneath the surface of English lyric poetry, and which has been reinforced in modern verse by its consonance with the mortalities and erotic conceits of the Metaphysicals and Jacobeans.
This penchant for the Gothic effect seems to me to weaken much of Sylvia Plath’s earlier verse, and it extends into her mature work. She used Gothicism in a particular way, making the formal terrors an equivalent to genuine and complex shocks of feeling, but the modish element is undeniable. Her resources were, however, more diverse. Possessed of a rare intensity and particularity of nervous response—the “disquieting muses” had stood at the left side of her crib “with heads like darning-eggs”—Sylvia Plath tested different symbolic means, different modes of concretion, with which to articulate what rang so queer and clear inside her. It is almost silly to argue “influences” when dealing with a young poet of this honesty and originality. But one can locate the impulses that helped her find her own voice. Wallace Stevens for one:
Death whitens in the egg and out of it.
I can see no colour for this whiteness.
White: it is a complexion of the mind.
Or Emily Dickinson, whose authority gives a poem like “Spinster” its spiky charm:
And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check.…
The tactile, neutral precision of D. H. Lawrence’s observations of animal and vegetable is recognizable in “Medallion” and “Blue Moles.” These poets, together with Andrew Marvell and the Jacobean dramatists, seem to have meant a lot. But the final poem in Colossus, a seven-part garland “For a Birthday,” is unmistakable. In at least three sections, “Dark House,” “Maenad,” and “The Stones,” Sylvia Plath writes in a way that is entirely hers. Had one been shown only the last six lines, one would have known—or should have—that a formidable compulsion was implicit and that a new, mature style had been achieved:
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse,
The vase, reconstructed, houses
The elusive rose.
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.
Undoubtedly, the success of this poem arises from the fact that Sylvia Plath had mastered her essential theme, the situation and emotive counters around which she was henceforth to build much of her verse: the infirm or rent body, and the imperfect, painful resurrection of the psyche, pulled back, unwilling, to the hypocrisies of health. It is a theme already present in Colossus (“Two Views of a Cadaver Room”). It dominates, to an obsessive degree, much of Ariel. As “Lady Lazarus” proclaims:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It requires no biographical impertinence to realize that Sylvia Plath’s life was harried by bouts of physical pain, that she sometimes looked on the accumulated exactions of her own nerve and body as “a trash / To annihilate each decade.” She was haunted by the piecemeal, strung-together mechanics of the flesh, by what could be so easily broken and then mended with such searing ingenuity. The hospital ward was her exemplary ground:
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
This brokenness, so sharply feminine and contemporary, is, I think, her principal realization. It is by the graphic expression she gave to it that she will be judged and remembered. Sylvia Plath carries forward, in an intensely womanly and aggravated note, from Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, a book that obviously had a great impact on her. This new frankness of women about the specific hurts and tangles of their nervous-physiological makeup is as vital to the poetry of Sylvia Plath as it is to the tracts of Simone de Beauvoir or to the novels of Edna O’Brien and Brigid Brophy. Women speak out as never before:
The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.
(“Childless Woman”)
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley.…
(“Tulips”)
It is difficult to think of a precedent to the fearful close of “Medusa” (the whole poem is extraordinary):
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sin.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.
The ambiguity and dual flash of insight in this final line are of a richness and obviousness that only a very great poem can carry off.
The progress registered between the early and the mature poems is one of concretion. The general Gothic means with which Sylvia Plath was so fluently equipped become singular to herself and therefore fiercely honest. What had been style passes into need. It is the need of a superbly intelligent, highly literate young woman to cry out about her especial being, about the tyrannies of blood and gland, of nervous spasm and sweating skin, the rankness of sex and childbirth in which a woman is still compelled to be wholly of her organic condition. Where Emily Dickinson could—indeed was obliged to—shut the door on the riot and humiliations of the flesh, thus achieving her particular dry lightness, Sylvia Plath “fully assumed her own condition.” This alone would assure her of a place in modern literature. But she took one step further, assuming a burden that was not naturally or necessarily hers.
Born in Boston in 1932 of German and Austrian parents, Sylvia Plath had no personal, immediate contact with the world of the concentration camps. I may be mistaken, but so far as I know there was nothing Jewish in her background. But her last, greatest poems culminate in an act of identification, of total communion with those tortured and massacred. The poet sees herself on
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Tarot pack and my Tarot pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
Distance is no help; nor the fact that one is “guilty of nothing.” The dead men cry out of the yew hedges. The poet becomes the loud cry of their choked silence:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Here the almost surrealistic wildness of the gesture is kept in place by the insistent obviousness of the language and beat; a kind of Hieronymus Bosch nursery rhyme.
Sylvia Plath is only one of a number of young contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights, themselves in no way implicated in the actual holocaust, who have done most to counter the general inclination to forget the death camps. Perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus on them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the thing, it has lost the hard edges of possibility, it has stepped outside the real.
Committing the whole of her poetic and formal authority to the metaphor, to the mask of language, Sylvia Plath became a woman being transported to Auschwitz on the death trains. The notorious shards of massacre seemed to enter into her own being:
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
In “Daddy” she wrote one of the very few poems I know of in any language to come near the last horror. It achieves the classic act of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously public images which concern us all. It is the “Guernica” of modern poetry. And it is both histrionic and, in some ways, “arty,” as is Picasso’s outcry.
Are these final poems entirely legitimate? In what sense does anyone, himself uninvolved and long after the event, commit a subtle larceny when he invokes the echoes and trappings of Auschwitz and appropriates an enormity of ready emotion to his own private design? Was there latent in Sylvia Plath’s sensibility, as in that of many of us who remember only by fiat of imagination, a fearful envy, a dim resentment at not having been there, of having missed the rendezvous with hell? In “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” the realization seems to me so complete, the sheer rawness and control so great, that only irresistible need could have brought it off. These poems take tremendous risks, extending Sylvia Plath’s essentially austere manner to the very limit. They are a bitter triumph, proof of the capacity of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined. She could not return from them.
Already there are poets writing like Sylvia Plath. Certain of her angular mannerisms, her elisions and monotonies of deepening rhyme, can be caught and will undoubtedly have their fashion. But minor poets even of a great intensity—and that is what she was—tend to prove bad models. Sylvia Plath’s tricks of voice can be imitated. Not her desperate integrity.