Dear Andrew,
I question the concept of the "industry" surrounding Plath. Do you mean
the publication history of the poems? If there is another industry, the
question to ask is who's profiting from it. Who's profiting from it?
Not Plath.
What are the "certain famous occasions" on which "Plath used poetry as a
means of personal revenge or a means of self-justification. Very much
like a weapon." These occasions are not famous to me. Tell me
(back-channel).
You begin your post in the hope that you will not generalise but you do,
hopelessly, in your claim that "fans" or non-fans of Plath tend to be so
because of their response to her "character." Sure what's the point of
conducting a poetry discussion on that basis? What's with the "fans,"
anyway? Are there a lot of Shakespeare fans out there too? When you say
"Those who are not fans tend not to be so for the same reasons --
resenting the high-level personal intrusions into the verse," you seem to
present the possibility that the verse pre-exists the intrusions. How
can this be? Do you mean that Sylvia Plath wrote perfectly good poems
and then proceeded to intrude on them in a high-level and personal way?
Bloody cheek! She was tampering with her own poems, the ones left in her
care, I mean it wouldn't be so bad if she was making low-level personal
intrusions on them, but high-level .... those poems should be put into
care (and they were).
Elizabeth Bishop, whom you compare favorably to Plath as a woman who did
not make high-level personal intrusions on verse, presumably, is a very
different case. She had a relatively long career, as opposed to Plath's,
which only had a beginning. Bishop also conformed far more readily to
the range allowed the woman writing poetry: she was single and had no
children. She also refrained from writing about her sexuality (which,
like any expression of female sexuality in poetry, was taboo).
Robert Lowell is pertinent to the discussion only if it is confined to
the narrow terms which I reject.
Your distinction between Hill's "under-cutting" and Plath's
"self-laceration" needs further elaboration.
I don't know why you see Plath only in terms of her poems about death,
which are not even very interesting. Her poems on pregnancy and birth
far outnumber her poems on death. They are by and large joyful and
celebratory. Moreover, Plath is the first poet in the English language,
to my knowledge, to produce a sustained body of work which directly
expresses the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. Canonically, she is
without doubt a major poet.
You object to Plath's poem "Thalidomide" on the grounds that the subject
is not approached for itself "but only as a framework around which
Plath could hang her excessively Gothic imagination." Why do you make
this claim? Plath made pregnancy and childbirth her subject matter
during the last 5 years of her life, at a time when she herself was
pregnant much of the time, and at a time when the thalidomide disaster
must surely have preoccupied very many women. Why is her decision to
write a poem about this "wearisome?"
I am interested in your connection between Mary Shelley and Plath. I
think there are salient differences but it's a fruitful comparison.
Frankenstein is definitely a story about procreation and creation,
as are the bulk of Plath's poems. There are other useful connections
which I won't go into now.
Thank you for the discussion. For anyone that's read this far, thank you.
Mairead
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