Interesting thread this, after the postings about mental disorders.
I'd like to take a general tack on this one (hopefully not too
generalised . . .)
In some ways I feel the industry surrounding Plath is generated
by her style of writing to some degree . . . with poems of such
a personal nature, they tend to invite a personal reaction towards
the writer as opposed to the poems themselves. Which brings
up the issue of what constitutes the 'personal' in a poem . . .
I'm thinking of Geoffrey Hill's opinion (echoing Eliot) that
despite a writer putting a great deal of him/herself into poetry,
poetry is not 'self-expression' . . . . .
I'm thinking that on certain famous occasions, Plath used poetry
as a means of personal revenge or a means of self-justification.
Very much like a weapon -- which accounts for a lot of their
amazing sharpness I think. The down-side is that it's become
almost impossible to read the poems without also forming some
kind of opinion about the writer herself. Those who are fans of
Plath, in my experience, tend to be so because they either
identify or sympathise with her character (as they perceive it
or appropriate it for themselves) rather more than they evaluate
the poems themselves. Those who are not fans tend not to be
so for the same reasons -- resenting the high-level personal
intrusions into the verse, the hermetic egotism, poems that have
the appearance of thumb-screws.
I'm thinking of Elizabeth Bishop in this regard, a writer whose
personality I know absolutely nothing about but whose poems
are no less fascinating.
Lowell I read rather differently, I think primarily because he didn't
use his inherent psychological problems as a kind of fuel for
the poems -- those periods in which he was not 'himself' were
possible to evaluate from a frazzled distance, thus allowing for
at least some degree of objectivity and self-deprecating humour.
I'm thinking of the line in 'Waking In the Blue' in which he
describes his unwell self in the hospital --
Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
I get the sense here that the phrase 'cock of the walk' is used
with a high dose of self-awareness, an awareness of his own
skewed sense of self-importance during those episodes, a
self-importance that would subsequently drain away into a kind
of resigned embarrassment. The lines above I have always
thought rather funny . . . . and that they are intentionally so.
I'm suddenly reminded of that line in one of Hill's poems (forget
which one) -- 'Death is my obsession this week'.
This form of under-cutting, as opposed to Plath's self-lacerating,
is always welcome.
Due to the very different nature of Plath's and Lowell's instabilities,
I tend to view Lowell as a victim of his disease, somehow, in a
way that Plath was not -- her depressive rage seemed much more
vital to the energy of her work. But this energy was just too
oppressive in her late poems IMO. It's not an energy I particularly
want to share in, as a reader, despite the skill with which it's
rendered.
Suddenly I'm wondering whether there's a stylistic link between
Plath and Curt Cobain . . . . . . . . . the American nihilist tradition . .
. .
beloved of depressive teenagers everywhere . . . . .
Andy
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