The Books: The Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry. Next book on the shelf:

The Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath

Faced with so many poems (more than half the volume covers the poetry written prior to 1960, the year The Colossus was published in Britain), many reviewers of The Collected Poems have declared that too much attention has been paid to the Ariel poems, that the early work is just as important and as accomplished. I find this now-fashionable judgment wholly frivolous, for, as I have argued elsewhere [see CLC, Vol. 17], Plath’s carefully constructed persona, the mask she presented to her adoring mother as well as to editors, professors, and friends, governed not only her domestic life but her poetry as well: until the summer of 1962, when Aurelia Plath [ Sylvia Plath’s mother] became an inadvertent witness to the dissolution of the Plath-Hughes marriage, Sylvia Plath — or “Sivvy” as she called herself in her letters home, never quite abandoned the carefully constructed voice that won her prizes and awards in all the right quarters, a voice her mother could and did approve of. Indeed, the early poems display a bewildering hodge-podge of influences: Hopkins and Yeats, Auden and Wilbur, Stevens and Thomas, and, a little later, first Lowell and then Roethke and Hughes himself. Influence is not quite the word here, for most of the early poems are merely imitative….

It is curious how impervious Plath was to what Harold Bloom has called the anxiety of influence. Hers was not the struggle with the great precursor so as to clear a space for herself. Rather, when, in the last two years of her life, she finally came into her own, the adopted voices merely evaporated, and a new harsh, demonic, devastating self, only partially prefigured in such poems as “The Thin People” (1957) and “The Stones” (1959), came into being.
— Marjorie Perloff

The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by her husband Ted Hughes, finally came out in 1981, almost 20 years after she committed suicide. At that point, what we had of Plath was her two collections of poetry, one published during her lifetime, one published posthumously: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, and also her novel The Bell Jar, also published posthumously. There was also Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, the letters Sylvia wrote to her mother – published in 1975, and a creepy strange volume. I think Aurelia Plath thought that the book would somehow absolve her from blame, or at least show the world that Sylvia was a happy normal woman, and not a depressive at all. We don’t get to read Aurelia’s side of the correspondence, however, and the book is so intensely edited with so many ellipses that the entire thing starts to seem rather sketchy. Although I have no love for Aurelia Plath, I certainly can’t blame her for feeling a little bit defensive about her famous suicidal daughter who had written such loving poems about her mother as “Medusa”. But still. That book seems to do the exact opposite of what Aurelia had hoped. There were a couple of biographies, and also a lot of scholarly works, but there wasn’t a lot of information out there.

The Collected Poems went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. It won the Pulitzer Prize. It garnered praise and criticism (still does). The fact that the “villainous” Ted Hughes had edited it was enough for some people to spiral off into conspiracy theories. What did he leave out?? Etc. I have covered my feelings about Ted Hughes and how he was treated in the many many years following his wife’s suicide elsewhere. I think he was treated abominably. He was the executor of her literary estate, and he did his best by his dead wife. He made mistakes. Big whoop. He’s human. We’re lucky we have the Collected Poems at all. It is a hugely generous volume, with literally hundreds of poems that had never been read before, by anyone, anywhere. Plath was young when she died, and yet there is still so much here. She had been writing poetry seriously since she was a teenager. He includes 50 poems from pre-1956, referred to as her “juvenilia”, stuff she had written in high school and college. It is fascinating to read. Many of them are just awful: arch, precocious, clever, you need a Thesaurus to understand what the hell she’s talking about. And many of them are clearly the outpourings of a repressed yet passionate teenager, wanting so badly to be a poet. And she was. She was successful as a teenager as well, already winning prizes and being published. You can feel the gift there. But it’s so hidden in clever curlicues that it is literally impossible to believe, at times, that this is the same poet who wrote such poems as the Bee poems, or Lady Lazarus or Daddy. That’s one of the most astonishing things about the Plath story. How ferociously she burst out of her chrysalis, and how soon after that she killed herself.

I have owned this particular volume since high school. I have often thought about buying a new copy because this one is so covered with my adolescent scribbles that some pages are nearly unreadable. I read this book obsessively as a teenager. And over my life since then, I have gone through Plath phases, where I will pick it up again. I always find something new in it, something I hadn’t noticed before, and that is one of the greatest strengths of this collection. I do think it is very interesting (and I’ve only done this about 3 or 4 times, all told) to read the entire book, front to back. Beginning to end. Don’t skip around. Read every poem in succession. This makes her explosion into her real self, her real voice, in 1961, 62, even more astonishing. It’s like there was no slow-burn with her (although you can see vestiges of her pet themes and images in her earlier stuff). But she didn’t percolate with unsung brilliance for years. You can actually sense the struggle in the earlier poems, the 1956, 1957, 1958 poems. These were the years of her quickie marriage to Ted Hughes, after only 4 months of knowing one another, and her stint teaching in Boston – while she struggled with not only being geographically close to her mother (it was a toxic suffocating relationship) but also debilitating writers’ block (the two are probably related). The writers’ block year is difficult to get through. She goes to the museum and writes poems on paintings she sees. But she never “breaks through”. The poems remain descriptive merely. When you know what she was actually hiding, what she was trying to protect, it is not surprising that she would resist “going there” for so many years. She needed to TORCH her entire life, her whole family, she needed to be free to write about them … and yet she did not feel free. This is something probably every writer understands to some degree.

Plath wrote the poems that would “make her name” in 1962 (mainly, with a few exceptions). She killed herself in February of 1963.

The Collected Poems looks at the whole. The whole of a truncated life. The villainelles she wrote as a college student. The Ted Hughes imitations – suddenly, when she started dating him, her poems became about nature and owls and badgers. I don’t think nature – as in the outdoors – held much interest for Plath, at least not as an entity in and of itself. Everything was a metaphor for her. EVERYTHING. But it was only in 1961, 62 that she really found her way with that. The sea is never just the sea for Plath. A horse is not just a horse. A tulip is not a tulip. Colors are not just colors. They are clues and symbols.

I wanted to choose an earlier poem today, perhaps one not as well-known, but worth taking a look at.

This was written in the winter of 1959, during the period where Hughes and Plath were living in the Boston area, and teaching. Plath had a rough year. She started to realize just how claustrophobic she felt around her mother (she discovered this with the help of what sounds like a really good therapist), and she thrashed about in writer’s block stasis for almost a year. She also struggled with Hughes’ burgeoning success, while at the same time she was happy for him. However, there seemed to be forces in her life which had a vested interest in strangling her expression. (This was a miscalculation on her part, but that doesn’t matter: what matters is that SHE felt that way). Her poems from this time are often quite disturbing, yet she seems unwilling to really follow through to the final conclusion of what she is getting at. She remains at a distance. You can’t FEEL her yet, although you get tantalizing glimpses.

The poem below, “A Winter Ship”, is one of my favorites of her earlier works. While yes, the poem remains on the surface, I can feel her struggling to delve deeper, to really ask herself: But what does this MEAN?? It is not enough to just describe a ship in the winter harbor. (Or, it’s enough for The New Yorker, but that’s another topic.) It is not enough to say: “The ship looked like this, here is what I noticed about the ship.” The question to ask, and the thing to explore is WHY I have noticed the ship. Why do I NEED to write about this ship? What is it about the ship? What is it trying to tell me? What is it making me think of?

Don’t be afraid of the big gestures. But Plath was careful early on. She avoided the “big gestures”. Of course, by the end, those last two years, every poem is a GIANT gesture.

I like “A Winter Ship” a lot. I like it because I can actually feel her trying to SAY something here. Her images are quite good, that ship leaps off the page in a very real way. I can see it, hear it, all that. And I can also sense her trying to “get at” something very disturbing to her, something eerie, a portent of … something. Also, the ship itself doesn’t appear until the last line of the second to last stanza, which creates a sense of anticipation, maybe even dread. The poem is called “A Winter Ship” and yet she spends almost 5 stanzas talking about docks and gulls and harbors. Additionally, in that 5th stanza, suddenly she mentions “we”, whereas in the previous stanzas, the voice is purely third-person and descriptive. It’s unbalancing. Who is this “we”? Of course we can assume it’s Plath and Hughes – however, that’s sometimes a mistake with her stuff. If you immediately assume every single word is strictly autobiographical, you miss the Art sometimes. It becomes a glorified journal entry, as opposed to a POEM. So, whoever the “we” is, it doesn’t matter. Suddenly, near the end of the poem we are confronted with a “we”, which obviously means two people (or maybe more – remember: don’t assume!) – taking a walk to see the sun come up, and instead they see the “iceribbed ship”. The last stanza describes the ship in language eloquent and yet not quite eloquent enough. The wave tips are glittering knives, the ship is an “albatross”, a “relic”. Does this “we” feel hopeful looking at the ship? At its mere fact of surviving rough weather? Or are they feeling something more ominous? Suddenly the sunrise becomes an engine of transformation. We think of the sun rising as helping things grow and flourish and open up. However, here, the sun will “diminish” the ship. How does the “we” feel about that? A sense of loss that the ice will melt? “Diminish” seems to suggest loss.

Ted Hughes, in one of his poems in The Birthday Letters, seems to reference this poem:

And in came that ice-caked ship,
Fret worked chandelier of lazy crystals
A whole wedding vessel lifted from under
The ocean salt – flash-frozen….
You howled with your sound turned off and your screen dark
For tragedy to go on

Hughes could feel her struggle to express too. The tragedy of a writer with the sound turned off.

A Winter Ship

At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.
Red and orange barges list and blister
Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,
And apparently indestructible.
The sea pulses under a skin of oil.

A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole,
Riding the tide of the wind, steady
As wood and formal, in a jacket of ashes,
The whole flat harbor anchored in
The round of his yellow eye-button.

A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin
Cigar over his rink of fishes.
The prospect is dull as an old etching.
They are unloading three barrels of little crabs.
The pier pilings seem about to collapse

And with them that rickety edifice
Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges
In the distance. All around us the water slips
And gossips in its loose vernacular,
Ferrying the smells of dead cod and tar.

Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes –
A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.
Even our shadows are blue with cold.
We wanted to see the sun come up
And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,

Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,
Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay
Encased in a glassy pellicle.
The sun will diminish it soon enough:
Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.