Notes for 25 February 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)
  • Some background:
    • Published first poem, Boston Herald, age 8.
    • First suicide attempt, 1953; treated with ECT and psychoanalysis.
    • B.A., Smith College, 1955; received scholarship to study at Cambridge University.
    • Married poet Ted Hughes, 1956 (two children: Frieda and Nicholas).
    • Plath and Hughes separated in September 1962, shortly after the revelation of Hughes’s affair.
    • Much of Plath’s best-regarded work is written during the next five months
    • Committed suicide, 11 February 1963.
  • Where do you want to start? What shall we talk about?
  • two thoughts to get us started, perhaps:
    • in these poems there are depths of the self that in life are not ordinarily acknowledged and in literature are usually figured in disguise. Traditionally, between the persona of the creation and the person of the creator a certain distance exists, and this has been so even for lyric poets and their utterances, habitually inclined to the first person as they are. (writing on poet Robert Lowell; Two Poets, Kenyon Review, 1959)
    • Lowell’s Skunk Hour and Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus were true examples [of confessional poetry] because they put the speaker at the center of the poem in such a way as to make his psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of his civilization.... [A] genuine confessional poem has to be superbly successful artistically if it is to achieve this fusion of the private and the culturally symbolic, but it must at any rate be far more highly charged than the usual poem. (Rosenthal, The New Poets, 1967)
    • How do you feel about this? Is it a fair description of how Plath operates as a poet? Sexton? Hughes? Lowell (if you know his work?)
    • What is the usual poem?
  • Daddy (p. 222+; October 12, 1962) (and here is Plath's own reading).

    In the German tongue, in the Polish town,
    Scraped flat by the roller
    Of wars, wars, wars.
    But the name of the town is common.
    My Pollack friend

    Says there are a dozen or two.
    So I never could tell where you
    Put your foot, your root,
    I never could talk to you.
    The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  • The standard discussion about Daddy (based on this)
  • Other Plath-related topics:
    • (other poems about) relationships to parents: The Disquieting Muses (74+), Full Fathom Five (92+), The Beekeeper's Daughter (118), The Colussus (129),
    • pregnancy: Metaphors (116), Morning Song (156), I Want, I Want (106)
    • nature and the feminine: Moonrise (98), The Moon and the Yew-Tree (172), Elm (192), Poppies in October (240)
    • identities: The Applicant (221+), Ariel (239), Lady Lazarus (244+)
• Edward Ted Hughes (1930–1998)
  • Plath in a 1961 BBC radio interview:

    I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.

  • From A Dream:

    Your worst dream
    Came true: that ring on the door-bell–
    Not a simple chance in a billion
    But a meteorite, straight down our chimney,
    With our name on it.

    [..........................................................]

    And for you, you said to me, permission
    To remember this dream. And think about it.

  • The Shot (pp. 16+)

    Your worship needed a god.
    Where it lacked one, it found one.
    Ordinary jocks became gods–
    Deified by your infatuation
    That seemed to have been designed at birth for a god.
    It was a godseeker. A god-finder.
    Your Daddy had been aiming you at God.
    When his death touched the trigger.

  • Other poems about Otto: The Bee God (150+), Being Christlike (153), A Picture of Otto (193+
  • death: Remission (109+), Totem (163+)
  • Poems about Hughes's (first) marriage:
    • the ceremony: A Pink Wool Knitted Dress (34+)
    • masculinity: Stubbing Wharfe (106+)
    • as a whole: Epiphany (113+), The Ventriloquist (181)
    • Plath and her poetry: Night-Ride on Ariel (174+)