November 22, 1981
You Could Say She Had a Calling for Death
By DENIS DONOGHUE
THE COLLECTED POEMS
By Sylvia Plath. Edited by Ted Hughes.
he facts of the case are easily reported. Sylvia Plath was born on Oct. 27, 1932,
daughter of Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father taught German at Boston University and
in 1934 published a study of bees. He died on Nov. 2, 1940. Sylvia had a scholarship to
Smith College, where she won the prizes, including a Fulbright to Cambridge
University. In 1956 she married the poet Ted Hughes; their first child, Frieda, was born
on April 1, 1960, their second, Nicholas, on Jan. 17, 1962. In October 1962 the
marriage fell apart, and they separated. A girl who lived mostly and terribly on her
nerves, Sylvia made several attempts to kill herself, the first apparently in 1953. She
died by her own hand on Feb. 11, 1963.
Plath's first important book, ''The Colossus,'' was published in 1960, and her novel,
''The Bell Jar,'' appeared a few weeks before she died. But most of her work was
published after her death: ''Ariel'' (1965), ''Three Women'' (1968), ''Crossing the Water''
(1971), ''Winter Trees'' (the same year) and a book of stories, ''Johnny Panic and the
Bible of Dreams'' (1977). To a few readers Plath was already a legend before her death,
but the publication of ''Ariel'' made the legend common if not universal property.
It is not an insult to Plath to say that her death was widely used to serve a wretched
rhetorical purpose. It was already volubly assumed that the only valid experience was an
experience of the abyss: Risk was suffused with an aura entirely heroic. The ideal death
was supposed to fulfill the appalling logic of being forced to live in such a world at such
a time. Suicide was the sign of authenticity. Sanity was supposed to feel ashamed of
itself. R.D. Laing and other writers made this sentiment popular and encouraged people
to believe, or at least to assert, that divinest sense is indeed constituted by much
madness. The jargon of authenticity, heightened with the vocabulary of sacrifice,
provided the context in which Plath's poems were first widely read; and, before we
knew where we were turning, Plath was accompanied in suicide by other gifted poets,
Randall Jarrell in 1965, John Berryman in 1972, Anne Sexton in 1974.
Plath's early poems, many of them, offered themselves for sacrifice, transmuting agony,
''heart's waste,'' into gestures and styles. In a short and often commonplace life, Plath's
experience was not extensive. The fact that it was extraordinarily intense does not mean
that it was in other respects remarkable. Self-absorbed, she showed what self-absorption
makes possible in art, and the price that must be paid for it, in the art as clearly as in the
death. Even in her famous poems she resented experience for not being enough or for
not suiting her well enough or disposing itself warmly enough in her favor. The truth is
that there was much in life, even in those bad years, which she prematurely rejected,
despised even when it was not despicable. Probably the world is never worthy of us, but
this is a conclusion we should reach later rather than sooner and never as a matter of
theory or principle. The intensity of Plath's poems is beyond dispute, but not the justice
of their complaint. Famous poems, including ''Tulips'' and ''Lady Lazarus,'' now seem
petulant to me, their self-regard understandable but still, when all is said, a pity: Dying Is
an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so
it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. You could also say, I guess, that
self-absorption has turned into self-satisfaction and that the reader is unjustly taken for
one of the ''peanut-crunching crowd'' pushing forward to see the big striptease, Lady
doing her number and singing the blues.
The moral claims enforced by these poems now seem exorbitant. It requires an
indecently grandiose rhetoric to make a cut finger, in the poem ''Cut,'' bleed such global
agony. The same rhetoric, in such poems as ''The Tour'' and ''Eavesdropper'' sends the
poet's rage over the edge into spleen. Reading ''The Bell Jar'' again, I find blatant rather
than just Plath's comparison between the electric shock treatment administered to the
heroine and the execution of the Rosenbergs. Even in Plath's most admired poem,
''Daddy,'' the poet's conceit of herself as an imaginary Jew, ''a Jew to Dachau,
Auschwitz, Belsen,'' is far less convincing, by which I mean far less earned and
imagined, than Berryman's in his story ''The Imaginary Jew.'' The thrill we get from
such poems is something we have no good cause to admire in ourselves. It is true, as
T.S. Eliot wrote in ''The Dry Salvages,'' that moments of agony are permanent, ''with
such permanence as time has,'' and that the torment of others remains an experience
''unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.'' That is what we resent in the torment of
others, that we cannot see it, as we see our own, wearing away. I recognize that this is a
factor in my recent experience of going through Plath's poems again.
But there is something else. I can't recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath's death proved her
life authentic or indeed that proof was required. As a Christian, I acknowledge one
sacrificial hero, and one is enough. But I recall that ''Ariel'' was received as if it were a
bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book. Even if I wanted to
have that feeling today, reading the ''Collected Poems,'' I would find it impossible. For
one thing, the times have changed. The elaborate mixture of rage, guilt, frustration and
hysteria does not seem a mark of the present years. About death, evidently, there is
much to be said; ignorance of the experience is not a constraint. Many of Plath's poems
say on that subject as much as can decently be said, and more. In one of William
Empson's coolest poems, ''Ignorance of Death,'' the poet says that death, though an
important subject, is one most people ''should be prepared to be blank upon.'' I agree
with him; also when he says that liberal hopefulness regards death ''as a mere border to
an improving picture,'' and that Freudians, regarding the death wish as fundamental,
''though the clamour of life proceeds from its rival Eros,'' don't say ''whether you are to
admire a given case for making less clamour.'' Let me quote him: Because we have
neither hereditary nor direct knowledge of death It is the trigger of the literary man's
biggest gun And we are happy to equate it to any conceived calm. We seem to have
come back now, 40 years after Empson's poem, to something like its tone: poised, not
indifferent, but unwilling to provoke appalling ends.
I am not saying that our first reading of Plath was wrong, or even naive, but that it
seized upon an element in her poetry which spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our
conscience needed, or thought it needed. By being real, the poems made us real, certain
that we existed. We accepted their violence as the true form of our own and were
grateful. But in some respects we were naive. I don't recall thinking, for instance, how
derivative so many of Plath's poems are, how they hang upon poems by Blake,
Ransom, Hopkins, Robert Lowell and especially Theodore Roethke. ''Bucolics'' is an
exercise in Ransom's way with language, ''Pursuit'' clings to Blake, ''Ode for Ted'' is a
nice compliment to Hughes and weak only by comparison with his strength, ''Point
Shirley'' is, as Hughes remarks, ''a deliberate exercise in Robert Lowell's early style,''
and ''Poem for a Birthday'' is just as deliberate in its relation to Roethke. Debts don't
matter, but the limiting factor in Plath's debts is that they begin and end by miming
their originals, their relation to their masters is never more than adhesion.
What we should have noticed, though, in our first reading of Plath's poems was the
distrust she turned upon communication. Not that her poetry is obscure. Part of its
appeal is its directness. But her sense of language and her sense of other people were
equally untrusting. Like many modern poets, she felt herself shortchanged by words:
The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,
In establishments which imag- ined lines Can only haunt. ''Establishments'' is a
wonderful perception, especially as Plath wanted nothing established but a free range,
open to ambrosial revelations. She never trusted words or trusted to luck with them or
believed that words sometimes give, by grace and favor and courtship, more than they
are importuned to give. She often took to language as if to revenge.
But I have to be more specific. Many of Plath's poems speak of words as if they were
hooks, twisted with malice, letters twisted into smiles, hooks on which she, poor fish, is
hung up to wriggle to her death. In a poem about burning old letters: And here is an
end to the writ- ing, The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles.
And at least it will be a good place now, the attic. At least I won't be strung just under
the surface, Dumb fish With one tin eye, Watching for glints, Riding my Arctic Between
this wish and that wish. In ''Daddy'': I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my
jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich. I could hardly speak.
In ''The Courage of Shutting Up,'' ''... there is that antique billhook, the tongue,/
Indefatigable, purple.'' And in one of the heartbreaking hospital poems, ''Tulips'': My
husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little
smiling hooks. Every inviting gesture falls under the shadow of suspicion; nothing is
It is my recollection that in our first reading of Plath we thought her best work was that
which expressed her talent, which we called her genius, most extremely. The poems
were good in proportion to the outrage that provoked them. I read them differently
now. In poems like ''Wreath for a Bridal,'' there is a serious disproportion between what
is being said and the moral claim enforced by the saying. The best poems now emerge
as those that live without fuss, poems in her middle style which eschew willed
sublimities, often poems of pure observation, the way something looks, the music it
makes by looking so. I'm thinking of ''Black Rook in Rainy Weather'' or poems that
discover something in the world other than Sylvia Plath worth attending to, like ''All the
Dead Dears'' or poems about landscapes ''unaltered by eyes'' or felt to be so unaltered.
Plath once claimed, quite early on, that she had 40 unattackable poems. I haven't
counted the poems that seem, on this recent reading, indisputable, but they include
''Lorelei,'' ''Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,'' ''Moonrise,'' ''Owl,'' ' 'Two Campers in
Cloud Country,'' ''Candles,'' ''Insomn i'Candles,'' ''Insomniac,'' ''Star sandles,''
''Insomniac,'' ''Stars Over the Dordogne,'' ''The Moon and the Yew Tree,'' ''Mirror,''
''The Babysitters,'' ''Three Women,'' ''Little Fugue,'' ''Poppies in October.'' As for
''Daddy'' and ''Lady Lazarus,'' I am unrepentant; they are too pleased with themselves.
The last stanza of ''The Disquieting Muses'' is unforgettable, but what leads to that place
is rather slack.
The publishing history of Plath's work has been a mess; random, haphazard, no make or
shape to it. The new edition prints 224 poems written after 1956 and set out now in
chronological order of composition, or as near as possible to that end. A further 50
poems have been chosen by Ted Hughes from Plath's work prior to 1956. The
''complete list of poems composed before 1956'' is not, in fact, complete. In many cases,
dates for the early poems are not given, presumably because they are not reliably
known. Still, there are bound to be more poems lying around or buried in improbable
magazines. Ted Hughes has added some notes about the circumstances in which certain
poems were written. What the entire book shows is that Plath's work makes not so
much a development but unpredictable explosions. The poems she wrote in October
1962 are the work of a poet possessed by a demon if not by herself, and from then to
Feb. 5, 1963, every day, virtually, is a torrent and a torment till the end.
Denis Donoghue's most recent book is ''Ferocious
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