Sylvia Plath, Poster Child of Confessional Poetry

SYLVIA PLATH, POSTER CHILD OF CONFESSIONAL POETRY

Whoever encounters Sylvia Plath, most likely in the classroom, will at first be struck by the power and intensity of her poetry. Plath devours the reader’s attention with the same frenzied energy with which she throws out her despairing, violent words.

Robert Pinsky’s description encapsulates the luridly visceral quality of her poetry.

“Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated, the poems of Sylvia Plath catch the feeling of a profligate, hurt imagination, throwing off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath

—“Sylvia Plath,” Poetry Magazine

Plath’s capacity to draw you into her interior bubble is one reason why she is very influential as a poet.

It wouldn’t be reason enough, however, to include her among the ten greatest women poets.

Once we recover from the shock of watching her furious poetry machine at work and survey her littered universe, we are able to step back and examine her poetry in context. By “context” we mean circumstances that are not only psychological and biographical but also sociological and historical. In this context her broad significance and unmistakable influence is apparent.

Plath is an American poet in the same sense that Whitman or Dickinson is American. Emergent literary figures of their time and place, Whitman’s and Dickinson’s appearance coincided with a major turning point in history, when America was coming into its own as a colonial and world power. 

Whitman sought to mythologize himself, that is, his poetic persona, as an embodiment of the American democratic ideal. 

Dickinson emerged as the highly original, enduringly popular American woman of letters who defined U.S. national identity at a time when the country was still very much a cultural colony of Western Europe. She created poetry that was distinctively American.

Although Plath did not originate Confessional Poetry—this honor goes to Robert Lowell—she is one of its most notable representatives. All lyric poetry is to some degree confessional, that is, it expresses private sentiments and experiences, including self-revelations. However, Lowell and company took the confessional mode one step further. Often in frank, uninhibited fashion they laid bare material that would discomfit and embarrass the reader, including content that probably should have remained inside the closet. 

Plath was a product of her time and place. She matured as a poet in the conservative—we might even say repressed—white middle-class postwar New England of the 1950s. Her confessional poetry can be understood as a reaction against straitlaced social constraints.

In this respect Plath is a twentieth-century Dickinson who defined American cultural identity. At one point Hollywood even saw fit to make a movie about her, Sylvia (2003).

However, her contribution to cultural history is not only local. Plath is the product of a long cultural trajectory in the West that witnessed the disintegration of the unifying worldview of Christian civilization and the rise of ideological liberalism, which practically replaced it. 

Marked individualism, so manifest in American poetry, traces back to Renaissance Humanism. 

Subsequently, the French Revolution was the political expression of growing individualism.

Modernism beginning in the nineteenth century coincided with the disintegration of the Western worldview, resulting in alienation.

Individualism and alienation are very much defining attributes of Plath’s poetry. Her work thus evinces the sociological and historical heritage of the West.

An important aspect of Plath’s poetry is that it is readily interpreted according to a feminist framework. Poetry Magazine, for example, relates:

“Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius.”

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath

As a feminist opus, Plath’s poetry exerts significant influence on American society and the larger world. Because feminism is here to stay, so is Plath.

Why did we choose Sylvia Plath and not Ann Sexton? They are very similar.

Plath edges out Sexton for trivial reasons. To begin with, we are more familiar with the work of Plath.

Morbidly, we would say that the drama of Plath’s life makes her a somewhat more compelling subject. Plath suffered from bipolar disorder, tragically committing suicide at 30 years old. Sexton committed suicide at 45.

One of Plath’s most famous poems is Ariel. We will comment on this poem to examine how Plath’s poetry achieves its peculiar effects and why the poem is described as Confessional.

ARIEL by Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue  

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,  

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to  

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye  

Berries cast dark  

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,  

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.  

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.  

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive  

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel

At first pass, without any information about the background of the poem, we are caught up by the power of the words. “God’s lioness”—an image of power, ferocity, voraciousness, and death—curiously, it is female. When the juice of berries is likened to blood—“Black sweet blood mouthfuls”—the poem turns macabre. Immediately following is this startling exclamation—“Something else / Hauls me through air— / Thighs, hair; / Flakes from my heels.”

Once we access the biographical details of this poem, it yields itself to plausible and more meaningful interpretation. “Ariel” is the name of the horse Plath liked riding at Devonshire, England, during the period when she was not yet separated from her husband. She wrote this poem on October 27, her birthday, about three months before her suicide, when she was living separately in London with their two children.

Plath reveals her suicidal intent in the poem. Curiously, her anticipation of self-inflicted death is both liberating and sinister. As the “arrow” that “flies” into the dawn, she aims at a “red eye,” a “cauldron.” Both images of death are threatening. Riding into the sun, Plath is “Godiva”—the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat who, naked astride a horse trotting through the streets of Coventry, liberated her tenants from the onerous taxes imposed by her husband. Death and freedom thus converge according to some dark contradiction.

Revelatory biographical connections between Plath’s life and the text of “Ariel” distinguish the poem as Confessional.

Another Plath masterpiece, Tulips, is similar to Ariel. Both poems call upon the power of vivid language. Their interpretation yields a harvest when the poem has been sown with biographical information.

TULIPS by Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.  

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.  

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.  

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses  

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff  

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,  

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.  

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

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.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat  

stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.  

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley  

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books  

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.  

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them  

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.  

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe  

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.  

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,  

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,  

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.  

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,  

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow  

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,  

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.  

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.  

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river  

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.  

They concentrate my attention, that was happy  

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;  

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,  

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0

“The tulips are too excitable”—the very first line pulls us into the fraught world of the poet.

By the end of the first stanza, because of references to nurses and surgeons, we know where we are—in a hospital bed.

As we step through the poem, we readily pick off images of personal torment—her head is an unblinking eye, her body a smooth, hard pebble, the smiles of her husband and child in the photo are sharp hooks snagging her skin.

Sixth stanza, tulips again, blood red like her wounds. The flowers suffocate her, she complains, because they compete for her oxygen. Devouring African cats, they stretch their mouths wide open.

To say that the entire poem is emotionally distraught is an understatement. We might title this work, “Hieronymus Bosch at the Hospital” or “Edvard Munch Wakes Up in Hell.”

Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, tells us that Plath wrote this poem in March 1961 after she had suffered a miscarriage and had to be hospitalized for an appendectomy.

See: https://rukhaya.com/poetry-analysis-sylvia-plaths-tulips/

—Rukhaya MK, “Poetry Analysis: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips,’” October 2, 2014

Tulips by Sylvia Plath—twentieth-century angst on steroids.

Sylvia Plath, undated photo