Plath lies silenced in her own bare grave in Ebden Bridge.
Her story has become a myth, and rightly so.
She was an extraordinarily talented woman and poet, beautiful and desperate.
None would commit suicide for a mare performance, (See Plath's claims of
artistic suicidal drive, in "Daddy". )
No, one does not do it for attention seeking. The attention seeker just
pretend to do it. She finally killed herself.
One must know what one is doing, when death is so close.
Totally irrelevant are the suppositions according to which she was hoping to
be rescued "on the threshold of death" by
her baby-sitter.
A suicidal person has as her only aim to lay bare and appeased in her own
silence.
She new it well.
That is why you keep talking about her. It is the force of it which scares
and attract us all.
Sonia Lipenolch (from cold Poland)
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 07, 2000 1:11 PM
Subject: Re: Plath again finally
>
> 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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