It's almost 2 in the morning and I have to get to sleep, so I'll be brief.
I'll answer Helen, then Ioana.

Helen: 1. I don't believe for a minute that Plath committed suicide because
her social context made it difficult for her to express herself in poetry.
She appears to have been unstable long before, and there's no shortage of
documentation, including The Bell Jar. She wasn't a martyr, she was a
suicide. The moralistic part of me thinks she might have thought of the
children, but I suspect that at the moment she didn't have that kind of
clarity. I'm sorry her life was like that, but she gains no moral privilege
by the act.
2. There's more than one female voice, and there was when Plath was
writing. I prefer, among Americans, and off the top of my very tired head,
Rukeyser, Niedecker, and Rochelle Owens. Maureen Owen too, but she's
younger. None remotely resemble Plath's "female voice," which, by the way,
may not be fair of you to ascribe to her.
3. It's not, I'll say again, an ideological, moral, educational or even
aesthetic failing to dislike poetry that other people like. Any more than I
think it's necessarily a failing on your part to like Plath's work. We're
all secretly persuaded, I suspect, that our aesthetic, political, etc.,
judgements are correct and if only others weren't so misguided they'd
agree, but there ought somewhere to be a still small voice that tells us
that even tho we may not understand it's possible for sensible people to
disagree. Plath, for some, seems to be a special case. If I said I don't
like Yeats would there be the same reaction? How about Akhmatova?


Ioana: A very different and I think more important point, and one that
could be fruitfully discussed. You say "I taught Plath, Rich and Harwood
this term (the selection was made by the course convener). I didn't try to
impose any of my views, because I believe that
the students have a right to make up their own minds." I'm in complete
agreement. That's why, when I've had the choice, I haven't taught poets
whose work I don't like. I assume that no matter how neutral I try to be my
attitude towards the work will be apparent. Worse, it will be unstated,
therefore not open to examination. And that could really contaminate a
student's choices.



At 08:20 AM 7/7/2000 GMT, you wrote:
>Dear all
>I read it somewhere, you know one of those things that you cut/paste in your
>journal, but will look for the proof later. For the moment though, I
>remember bits... Sylvia lived under the shadow of Hughes, so they said, she
>wrote 'rebellion' - just as Dickinson did. It was that era, the female voice
>was subjugated. The male voice was dominant, so Sylvia and the girls wrote
>about their suppression. And if ...in this atmosphere there was the eternal
>personal struggle to empower her voice alongside her equal (as she would
>have viewed Teddy's poetry) it was in trouble, far deeper than anyone could
>have possibly imagined. She ended her life, sadly, because of this 'female'
>struggle.  Her poetry stands testimony to this.  Whether you like her poetry
>or not you cannot dismiss the history of the women's suffrage movement
>vis-a-vis 'feminism' and esp. in literature going back to the days of
>Virginia Woolf.
>It's my opinion that the female voice still struggles and that the female
>poet in her attempts to be as feminine as possible is still misunderstood by
>the other half of the population - as Adrienne Rich wrote in connection to
>the female voice in (Adrienne Rich Poetry and Prose - a Norton Critical
>Edition) 'she goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the
>world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is
>looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilites; and over and over in the
>"words' masculine persuasive force" of literature she comes up against
>something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman
>in books written by men.'  eg. Belle Dame Sans Merci, Juliet, Tess or
>Salome.
>So, Rich goes on to say that to find that female voice she read Sappho and
>Dickinson and in even reading these women, she found that she was looking in
>them for the same things she had found in the poetry of men. Even though she
>wanted female poets to be the equals of men, she still found them sounding
>the same as men.
>One could say that when it comes to 'taste' some only have it in their mouth
>and that males (not all, thank god) are very mis-informed about the struggle
>of the female voice.
>Helen
>
>>From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
>>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>>To: [log in to unmask]
>>Subject: Re: I saw something nasty in the bell jar
>>Date: Fri, 07 Jul 2000 00:09:17 -0700
>>
>>I think that I'm living proof that one needn't be tasteful to dislike
>>Plath's work. And I don't find all those who like her work distasteful,
>>only some of them.
>>There is such a thing as a difference of opinion. But apparently not in
>>Plath's case. Why should this be so?
>>
>>At 07:15 AM 7/7/2000 +0100, you wrote:
>> >
>> >Jon Corelis wrote:
>> >
>> >>    On one occasion I played the Plath's recording of Daddy to a woman
>>of
>> >my
>> >> acquaintance who had never read it.  As soon as it was over she
>> >> remarked, "What a nasty poem!"
>> >
>> >But of course. The main reason Plath is worth reading is that, as  a real
>> >poet, she lacked taste. A lesser poet would have shared your sensitive
>> >friend's reaction, would have repressed the urge to write in tasteless
>> >unladylike, abnormal ways. Plath had the courage and integrity to write
>>as
>> >she knew the world was,  and damn tastefulness.
>> >
>> >Isn't there always a "Wound and the Bow" dimension to great poets? I
>>think
>> >of Eliot, with the intellectual/moral courage to write the world as he
>>felt
>> >it, not just stay inside the limitations of nice polite Georgian prosody.
>> >The cost of this was that part of what he expressed was his nasty
>> >anti-Semitism.
>> >
>> >It's not the job of the poet to be tasteful or comfy. It's the job of a
>>poet
>> >to write and be damned. And there will always, as this Plath thread
>>shows,
>> >be a long queue of tasteful people ready to do the damning.
>> >
>> >George
>> >______________________________________________
>> >George Simmers
>> >Snakeskin Poetry Webzine is at
>> >http://www.snakeskin.org.uk
>> >
>> >
>> >
>>
>
>________________________________________________________________________
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>
>
>



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