Sylvia Plath's Ariel, reviewed by Diana Manister

[dmanister]

Chris, thanks for your thoughtful comment. My aim in the review of Ariel was to isolate the aspects of her illness that unfortunately leaked into her poems, marring them. Mad poets do not always write mad poems, thankfully.

I think the New Criticism that held literature under its mailed fist for decades is now defunct. New Critics had apoplectic fits if anyone brought biographical facts into the discussion of a writer's work.

But everybody does that now. Just look at last Sunday's review of Donald Hall's new book of selected poems in the NY Times. They are all over his life, his house, his marriage, his hobbies.

You can't fault poetry because the poet is mad, immoral, or obnoxious. But you can discuss mad, immoral and obnoxious elements in a poem. And backing up your opinions with biographical facts seem ok now.

Diana

.

[chrissiekl]

[dmanister]

Well if poets write about their lives, as Hall does, they introduce their biographies themselves. To dissociate the work from the writer totally impoverishes the reading experience. Even Prufrock and The Wasteland are more interesting when you know what Eliot was going through when he wrote them, even though he keeps his personal life out of the poems.

Anyhoo, thanks for the good literary discussion -- most enjoyable! Diana

.

[totemic]

Sylvia Plath's Ariel: The Restored Edition

HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-073259-8

Reviewed by Diana Manister

Ariel is Sylvia Plath’s last book. Most of the poems were written in a manic burst during a period of grief and rage over her impending divorce from British poet Ted Hughes, who left her for another woman. She had tried suicide at nineteen and failed; after completing the Ariel poems at thirty, she succeeded.

As her heir and literary executor, Hughes sent the Ariel manuscript off to be published, leaving out some poems she had intended to include and an additional few she had written in her last days. Much controversy ensued: Hughes was accused of everything from censorship to murder. This new facsmile edition of Ariel sets the record straight by replicating Plath’s typed manuscript, along with her drafts and handwritten corrections. This is the book she intended to publish.

In addition to the facsimile volume, a draft of the poem “Swarm” and a script for the BBC broadcast "New Poems by Sylvia Plath," in which she relates the conditions in which she composed some of her well-known poems, is also included. Her daughter Frieda Hughes provides a revealing foreword in which she defends her father’s actions regarding Plath’s legacy, describing the difficulties the family has endured as a result of Plath’s canonization and Hughes’demonization. Anyone interested in Plath hagiography, which is plentiful, will find this new biographical material essential.

In Ariel, Plath’s poetry is at its best and its worst. Grimmer than ever, the poems abound in repugnant words and phrases – maggots, cripples, torture, shrieks, glass eye, rubber crotch, flesh in the grave, pick the worms off me, a baby with a big blue head, dead hands, red meat, death-gowns – an unrelenting foisting of morbid imaginings on her readers amounting to poetic sadism, or at least hostility. Marianne Moore, with her unerring instinct for a literary flaw, once asked her, “Why do you have to be so grisly?” Yet if sunny optimism were required of major poets we would have very few – whose work is less life-affirming that of the monumental T.S. Eliot?

( You quote Marianne Moore’s question “Why do you have to be so grisly?”
it’s a pity that we don’t have Plath’s response)

The flaw that makes Plath seem less than a major voice in modern poetry is concealed by her verbal pyrotechnics. Her mastery of the craft is unquestionable: she had a gift for the telling image and the expressive metaphor – the moon in her hood of bone – and for unexpected verbal combinations – sweet blood mouthfuls, a box of maniacs. She could change nouns into verbs – I carpenter myself – and adjectives into nouns – pale irretrievables. Her ear for music enabled her to wring the last drop of signification from cadence, assonance, consonantal clusterings and rhymes of every kind – internal, end, slant, eye. She could, like James Joyce, do anything she wanted with language.

(When you quote Marianne Moore you maintain that Plath’s flaw is in her being”so grisly” and you go on to say “the flaw that makes Plath seem less than a major voice in modern poetry is concealed by verbal pyrotechnics” but apart from the grisly nature of her work you don’t say what the flaw is)

So what accounts for the lessening of her reputation in recent years? Yes, she was deeply disturbed and it shows in the work, but sanity is not a requirement for great poets; Dylan Thomas, Roethke, Pound, Eliot himself, the list of important poets who broke down repeatedly goes on and on.
Perhaps it is her use of high literary language to whine about how badly life treated her that is off-putting. Not every neurotic poet indulges in self-pity; where Plath is a professional victim,

(Is this the flaw)?

Roethke avoids romanticizing his private pain, celebrating wellness: I believe in the sparrow, happy on the gravel, he wrote.

Self-obsessed poetry reached new heights in the Romantic period in the work of Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley (Keats was self-effacing), but always ran the risk of growing ego-inflated. John Clare, who wrote sane nature poetry during twenty-three years in the Northampton Lunatic Asylum, warned: That little personal pronoun “I” is such a presumptuous ambitious swaggering little fellow.

If prosodic expertise were the only criterion for greatness, Plath would be unbeatable. But content counts. Ariel’s publication comes at a time in literary history when the confessional mode is the norm, to the point where impersonal poems seem chilly and remote by comparison. What started as Everyman, however, has become All About Me, a tendency that has reached such solipsistic extremes that if we are to have literature instead of eavesdropping a reversal seems inevitable.

(Maybe this indicates a develpoment in 20th century society which sees the individual beginning to emerge from the mass and reflects the hedonism of the times)

(This paragraph doesn’t explain the difference between “eavesdropping and “literature.”
Solipsism brings to mind the work of Samuel Beckett and I can’t believe you’re saying that his work, which deals with exaggerated solipsism in which the self can never know itself, is less than literary)

The work of Robert Lowell, the titular head of the confessional movement and one of Plath’s teachers, is also undergoing reassessment. Once heralded as the consummate stylist of Lord Weary's Castle and Mills of the Cavanaughs, he went on to produce ever more self-obsessed poems. His reputation has suffered, largely because of his Promethean aggrandizing in Life Studies, whereas the work of his friend Elizabeth Bishop, less melodramatic and self-centered, continues to grow in importance.

(“melodramatic and self-centered;” is the “flaw” contained within these characteristics)?

Plath’s poetry is even more grandiose than Lowell’s. Her little personal pronoun swings from one extreme to another, either an apotheosized victim of powerful, fascist-booted men – in one poem she is a child holocaust victim – or an avenging Medea warning us against her superhuman powers: Beware. Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air. A little of this goes a long way.

(Hell hath no fury…here comes feminism)

Not only does she inflate her persona, she enlarges other characters in her drama to Wagnerian extremes. In the early days of her relationship with Hughes she wrote: "We make love like giants." She had a dread of normalcy, depicting herself as a Greek goddess, a she-devil, Lady Godiva, Jesus, Lazarus, Medea, Medusa, a dematerializing Madonna ascending to an incorporeal heaven. Anything, that is, but ordinary. What has she got to say about everyday human-size living?

(“Every woman adores a Fascist.”)

Critic Judith Kroll writes of Plath’s work: “personal experience provides the starting-point, but only after it has become worked over and metamorphosed into myth does the material become poetically acceptable.” Yet Plath rarely achieves this. When Kafka created Gregor Samsa he wrote about the human condition, but Plath’s poems are all about her. Mythic generalization of her personal experience is not a failed enterprise but one she never began – she simply stole some of the gods’ fire to light up her own individual image.

(Is she any different to Dylan Thomas in this sense)?

Her poems pervert the humbling ends of mythology, whose caveats warn us away from hubris lest our wax wings melt in the sun. Plath’s protagonist, who is always Sylvia herself, flies straight into it, as if she were too powerful to succumb – in the title poem, "Ariel," she writes, "I am the arrow/The dew that flies/Suicidal, at one with the drive/Into the red/Eye, the cauldron of morning,”

(Great Stuff! Rock’n Roll! Very masculine and I wonder if this might be a clue to the reviewer’s antipathy to the reviewed. Is there a gender thing going on here. Would you be so critical of the writer if the work was that of a man)?

If it were possible to imagine her authorial consciousness as separate from the overblown personae she creates, the poems would work, but Plath establishes little distance from her mythologized narrators. In "Colossus," a poem critic Helen Vendler calls "her first perfect poem" Plath’s narrator is exhausted from a life devoted solely to maintaining a huge statue, climbing around it on ladders, carrying glue and Lysol, sleeping in its ear, watching the sun rise under the pillar of its tongue, an ostensible acknowledgement by Plath of her obsession with her father. The poem’s narrator has polished the monument "for thirty years," or as long as Otto Plath had been dead.

(I’m not quite sure what you mean by “authorial consciousness and the seperation of that from the overblown personae she creates.” Could you elucidate, please).

A theme emerges in “Colossus” of an Electra wholly devoted to keeping fresh the memory of her larger-than-life father (although one besotted commentator, believe it or not, interprets the poem as Sylvia Plath repairing the canon of Western poetry!) Taken by itself, the poem seems to warn against the sacrifice of adult life for a childhood fixation, a point of view that would make positive use of mythology. Seen in the light of the Ariel poems, however, “Colossus” is another ego-inflation.

(Electra - A daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon who with her brother Orestes avenged the murder of Agamemnon by killing their mother and her lover, Aegisthus).

The death of Plath's father, when she was nine, traumatized her for life. Aurelia Plath, her mother, has described with many touching examples the little girl's adoring love for her father, and his for her. Listening to a bee buzzing in his closed fist, she was awed by his magical affinity with nature. When he was ill at home, she wore a child-sized nurse's uniform and brought him his medicine. His only daughter, Sylvia was coddled and adored. When he died after she had prayed fervently for his recovery she said "I will never speak to God again."

She lived within that perpetual crisis, re-playing the trauma in poem after poem without increasing her insight or moving towards resolution, always portraying herself as a tragically betrayed victim of repellent, malevolent forces. In "Daddy" she obscenely compares herself to a German Jew murdered by her Nazi father. In reality, Otto Plath was an apolitical college professor and beekeeper, never a Nazi, whose only "crime" was dying.

(It is hardly surprising that someone of her dates and family background was influenced by the war and the iconography that went with it).

“Colossus” can be seen not only as a description of her outsized obsession with her father, but as an exaggeration of her helplessness, as if she had no choice except to live out a myth, an attitude she adopted right through her last poems in Ariel. In “Gulliver” Ted Hughes is portrayed as a giant surrounded by antlike people, "the shadow of his lip, an abyss" a depiction of Hughes monumental status as her consort and the tiny sycophants and critics who surrounded him in the London literary establishment. The tone is one of disgust – how could he give her up for those Lilliputians? How far is that from the "The Colossus" written three years earlier? Rather than question her exaggerations, she enlarges the dimensions of her environment and everyone in it, the better to disguise her error in establishing accurate proportions, even from herself.

(We have a picture of a woman who had an obsessive preoccupation with her father - who died prematurely when she was young and impressionable – she worked this material into her confessional poetry until her own untimely and tragic death).

When Hughes left her – perhaps he preferred a more earthly existence to that of two deities engaged in cosmic battles -- she took it not only as a painful narcissistic blow but as the end of her self-created universe. Her cosmology allowed no scenario in which she was not the sun and center.

(Sounds like Everywoman to me).

There were many signs that if the grandiose edifice of her ego-defenses collapsed, she would be in grave danger. On her honeymoon she wrote a short story about a woman who kills herself because her dreams are less impressive than her husband's. Because she wrote with such brilliance, no one read her literary tropes as omens.

(Are you sure of this)?

In "Cut," the associative linking of metaphors is paratactic and private to the point of being schizoid. Her bleeding thumb is compared to a pilgrim, a carpet roll, Redcoated soldiers, a homuncleus, a saboteur, a Kamikaze man, a dirty girl, a trepanned veteran, and its bandage is "A Ku Klux Klan babushka."

(But is it any good)?

(homunculus = A diminutive human.
A miniature, fully formed individual believed by adherents of the early biological theory of preformation to be present in the sperm cell).


We can make some wild guesses as to why this mad hodge-podge of imagery is tossed together, but the final explanation is hermetically sealed within the bell jar of the writer’s psyche. Rather than revealing meaning by their juxtapositions, the metaphors in “Cut” refer to Plath’s private world of associations, meaningless as art but alarming as symptoms of a cognitive breakdown. The poem’s only message is that the most humdrum event of her life was historically important; the poem becomes another example of how delusions of grandeur marred her work.

(Is this “the flaw” you refered to earlier)?

Confessional poems achieve greatness when they express an individual’s shareable humanness, rather than superhuman delusions. Not that ordinary people do not have moments of mania. William Carlos Williams, whose feet are usually firmly planted on New Jersey ground, writes in “Danse Russe” about an enjoyable moment of grandiosity in his non-inflated life:

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
...if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
...If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

But Williams speaks of his inflation from an ironic distance, with the knowledge that Everyman experiences self-transcending moments. It is clear from the tongue-in-cheek tone of the poem that he regards grandiosity as an occasional aberration experienced by everyone. In Jungian terms, one would say he was not possessed by the archetypes that arose during his psychic explorations. Plath exhibits no such distance. Lacking Williams’ artistic balance, she falls into confessional poetry’s biggest trap – megalomania. Her readers are not fellow Everymen but an audience invited to worship at the shrine of Sylvia, Saint and Martyr. Not an enticing proposition unless one enjoys a folie à deux.

(So, at last, we have it -- “megalomania” -- is the flaw)

(Megalomania = A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence).
(I should have thought that these attributes were prerequisite for anyone who attempted to write anything).

(folie à deux) A condition in which symptoms of a mental disorder, such as the same delusional beliefs or ideas, occur simultaneously in two individuals who share a close relationship or association.

(I’ve got this).

Your review was, as always, both stimulating and erudite.

Thanks for the read,

Stewart.

[dmanister]

Stewart, with regard to your comment:

[Magnolia77]

Hi.

I knew nothing of Sylvia Plath's life when I first read her poetry. And I loved it. And I still do. Yes, she is all about the "I", but, to me, her "I" is so adept in lanuage and metaphor, so able to express what some people feel abou their own pain. I would much rather read her than Mary Oliver.

Confessional poetry is still alive today, it is just watered down, not big enough. It treads timidly so as not express any emotion.

The use of "I" in itself, in my opinion does not dismiss the universal. There are probably many people who feel "out of control" when bad things happen, but can't or won't express it. I also like reading her because of her sometimes over-the-top-ness. Maybe she just hits on certain people's bruised psyches and others, who don't have such wounds can't relate.

Maybe confessional poetry went out of fashion because like with everything, everyone thought they could do it, or everyone thought their little hangnails make for good poetry.

Just my thoughts,
Nanette

[JoelJosol]

I have read several of SP's poems. A friend shared a recent discovered poem from the archives of a school where she came from entitiled 'Ennui'. I love the use of language, her use of metaphors, the flow of her poems, her angst. One critic told me that I shouldn't so much dig into the bio of a poet as much as looking into her philosophy of writing. I was quite surprised with that because in the visual arts, Vincent Van Gogh's bio help me appreciate the power of his painting.

Sylvia is part of an anthology of great modern American poets I purchased some time ago that included big names like Eliot, Cummings, and Yeats. Would that make SP a major because of her inclusion?

[dmanister]

Nanette,

[posthumous]

Perhaps it is her use of high literary language to whine about how badly life treated her that is off-putting. Not every neurotic poet indulges in self-pity; where Plath is a professional victim...

Could you give examples of where her poetry is whiny? That's quite a claim.

She had a dread of normalcy, depicting herself as a Greek goddess, a she-devil, Lady Godiva, Jesus, Lazarus, Medea, Medusa, a dematerializing Madonna ascending to an incorporeal heaven. Anything, that is, but ordinary.

You cannot imagine another motivation for using these characters besides "dread of normalcy"? Or is there some other evidence of this dread that you are not providing?

What has she got to say about everyday human-size living?

All that matters is if she has got something to say about being human. She does.

Her poems pervert the humbling ends of mythology, whose caveats warn us away from hubris lest our wax wings melt in the sun. Plath’s protagonist, who is always Sylvia herself, flies straight into it, as if she were too powerful to succumb – in the title poem, "Ariel," she writes, "I am the arrow/The dew that flies/Suicidal, at one with the drive/Into the red/Eye, the cauldron of morning,”

Did you miss the word "Suicidal"? Her poems drip with the consequences of hubris as much as Sophocles' plays. It is the source of much of that "grisliness" you were complaining about earlier.

If it were possible to imagine her authorial consciousness as separate from the overblown personae she creates, the poems would work...

this is easy for me to do.

but Plath establishes little distance from her mythologized narrators.

This is a big claim. At first I thought you weren't providing evidence for it, but you do get to it eventually. See below.

She lived within that perpetual crisis, re-playing the trauma in poem after poem without increasing her insight or moving towards resolution...

ah, so you want resolution from poems? closure, perhaps? I don't see any reason why poems need to increase the poet's insight or move towards resolution. Why can't a poem simply convey horror in all of its majesty?

“Colossus” can be seen not only as a description of her outsized obsession with her father, but as an exaggeration of her helplessness, as if she had no choice except to live out a myth, an attitude she adopted right through her last poems in Ariel.

okay, this is where you end up in your examination of why Plath "establishes little distance from her mythologized narrators." It's the helplessness you don't like. You can't relate to pain that never gets resolved, pain we are helpless against, and that is why you don't like Plath. Okay, that makes sense. I can relate to that pain, so Plath speaks to me directly.

Rather than question her exaggerations, she enlarges the dimensions of her environment and everyone in it, the better to disguise her error in establishing accurate proportions, even from herself.

so the purpose of poetry is to establish accurate proportions? I disagree.

When Hughes left her – perhaps he preferred a more earthly existence to that of two deities engaged in cosmic battles -- she took it not only as a painful narcissistic blow but as the end of her self-created universe. Her cosmology allowed no scenario in which she was not the sun and center.

There were many signs that if the grandiose edifice of her ego-defenses collapsed, she would be in grave danger. On her honeymoon she wrote a short story about a woman who kills herself because her dreams are less impressive than her husband's. Because she wrote with such brilliance, no one read her literary tropes as omens.

so shall all poets who could not make their lives work out well be disregarded? And the ones who are not disregarded, are they the ones whose poetry did not reflect the chaos of their lives?

In "Cut," the associative linking of metaphors is paratactic and private to the point of being schizoid. Her bleeding thumb is compared to a pilgrim, a carpet roll, Redcoated soldiers, a homuncleus, a saboteur, a Kamikaze man, a dirty girl, a trepanned veteran, and its bandage is "A Ku Klux Klan babushka."

You really see no relation between those images? I don't see the difference between this and the examples of "mastery of craft" you use in the beginning.

We can make some wild guesses as to why this mad hodge-podge of imagery is tossed together, but the final explanation is hermetically sealed within the bell jar of the writer’s psyche.

They are wild guesses only in the sense that all criticism is wild guesses. They are hermetically sealed only in the sense that all poets' intentions are hermetically sealed.

Rather than revealing meaning by their juxtapositions, the metaphors in “Cut” refer to Plath’s private world of associations, meaningless as art but alarming as symptoms of a cognitive breakdown.

Cut is a brilliant, vivid poem that throbs with meaning. I'm sorry that meaning is not available to you, but I assure you it is available to some.

The poem’s only message is that the most humdrum event of her life was historically important; the poem becomes another example of how delusions of grandeur marred her work.

I'm amazed that you could possibly glean that interpretation from a poem that is an intimate conversation with her own thumb. History is part of the private world in which she attempts to stay connected with herself (or marvels that she cannot).

But Williams speaks of his inflation from an ironic distance, with the knowledge that Everyman experiences self-transcending moments. It is clear from the tongue-in-cheek tone of the poem that he regards grandiosity as an occasional aberration experienced by everyone.

Why is it necessary for the poet to wink? Must all poetry of transcendence be tongue in cheek?

In Jungian terms, one would say he was not possessed by the archetypes that arose during his psychic explorations. Plath exhibits no such distance. Lacking Williams’ artistic balance, she falls into confessional poetry’s biggest trap – megalomania. Her readers are not fellow Everymen but an audience invited to worship at the shrine of Sylvia, Saint and Martyr. Not an enticing proposition unless one enjoys a [i]folie à deux.

Why is being possessed by archetypes megalomania? You completely overlook the self-effacing qualities of her poetry. I never once felt that Plath wanted me to worship her. She does require worship from me, but she as poet and I as reader are both facing the same way, both kneeling.

[dmjones]

Posthumous:

Your reply to Diana is brilliant. The last paragraph says it all - "she as the poet and I as the reader..."

regards from Sylvia and dmjones

[auto]

Thanks, Diana, enjoyed this review. Your main point, that Plath's staure is diminished by her grandiosity, is very fully and compellingly expressed.

Take care,

Auto

[dmanister]

Thanks Auto,

You are a discriminating reader, so your opinion carries weight!

Plath's anger is obvious to me in the poems. It's a kind of teeth-grinding rage that is expressed between the lines, as it were. She disguises it.

I don't know what she hoped to accomplish with "Daddy" besides venting her anger that her dad left her by dying. That kind of anger is a natural accompaniment to the death of a loved one, particularly in children. But she twists the anger into something I don't even recognize. Why should the villagers regard her father as Vlad the Impaler or some other monstrous person? That's where she crosses the border into unreality.

She wants to convince the world to share her rage at her father, but why should anyone else be angry at him for dying of diabetes? He was a professorial bee-keeper and scholar, and from all accounts a tender father.

Literary critics rarely mention Plath's anger in their interpretations of her poetry.

Thanks for commenting!

Diana

.

[indy21]

[dmanister]

Dear indy,

Some years ago W.K. Wimsatt wrote an essay titled "The Intentional Fallacy" that once and for all put to rest the idea that a poem expresses only the poet's intention.

Recent literary theory incorporates the work of Freud and Lacan who inferred the presence of emotions of which the subject is unaware from slips of the tongue and other unintended revelations of content the speaker, or writer, does not intend to utter. Often these bubblings erupt into statements that are exactly the opposite of what the speaker's or writer's intention is.

The defense that "the author didn't intend to say that" no longer works as an approach to literature. Speech whether written or spoken betrays our intentions. Shameful and unwanted opinions and feeling bubble up from somewhere outside of awareness to get themselves said.

Plath could have written any number of poems criticizing Nazism that did not involve comparing her dead father to a black-booted fascist. He was anything but. He was never a Nazi. He was German. Is it legitimate to call any German a Nazi? I think not.

She could for example have used for the target of her anger a father who really was a Nazi. Did Goebbels have children? She could have compared a real Nazi's indulgence of his own children with his unspeakable treatment of Jewish children, or in fact written her poem with any number of antagonists other than her father, who in truth had few characteristics on which to hook an anti-Nazi rant.

But she picked Otto Plath, who was not patriarchal in the slightest. His wrote books about bees. Her mother was not oppressed, restricted or ruled by him and neither were Plath or her brother Warren.

I don't buy her BS, although I've no doubt that she believed it herself. She was rationalizing her indefensible rage against her innocent father, elevating a shabby and indecent comparison of him with Nazis to a political statement. Just pure bull.

Deconstruction's main activity is pointing up the ways an author contradicts him or herself in writing. It's not difficult to deconstruct "Daddy."

Diana

.

[indy21]