Content Warning: mentions of suicide and pregnancy loss.
This was my first time ever reading Sylvia Plath outside of one or two poems included in a poetry anthology that I read in undergrad. I’m often wary of reading poets considered “essential” to American poetry because so often, those poets tend to represent white, heterosexual patriarchy, and there’s just so much better poetry available. And while I think poets like Poe and Whitman are great, their poetry rarely plants itself inside of me like other poets have. Last winter/spring semester, I read a large portion of John Keats’ work (and yes, I know he was English, not American), and while I definitely was inspired by him, I was somewhat relieved when I could put his book aside and shift to other poets like Arthur Rimbaud or Alice Knotley or Fanny Choi or Claudia Rankine (among many others).
I haven’t exactly avoided Sylvia Plath, but I wasn’t itching to dig into her work, either. But part of my resolution for this year was to embrace the wide variety of poets and types of poetry that exist, and to explore them without limiting myself.
This perusal of Plath’s collection of poetry filled me with so many conflicting emotions and personal inspirations. I was especially drawn to her use of language and imagery: “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. / Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb / Where the yew trees blow like hydras…” (From “Munich Mannequins.”) These images coupled with her choice of words, and especially how the poems take up white space, evoke a kind of desolation. It’s a bit hard to describe, but as I was reading this book, I felt deeply set apart and displaced, as if I had been transported to somewhere unknown to me, a space that, perhaps, I was only given access to resentfully. Not that I think the speaker in Plath’s poems is resentful of the reader, but I did sense moments of almost eavesdropping, as if I was begrudgingly being given a glimpse of things the speaker would like to forget or ignore.
Many of these poems encapsulate feelings of abandonment, fear, dread, despair, and of being lost, either inside of one’s self or because of one’s self. There’s a kind of poetic urgency in these poems, a desperation bordering on starvation that doesn’t just pull the reader into the work, but makes them part of it, almost weaving the reader into the role of the narrator. It’s something I’ve never quite experienced before when reading poetry, this shifting into and out of seemingly contradictory roles. How can I, as the reader of a work, simultaneously be the narrator or step into a narrative space? Somehow, Plath allows these contradictions to come alive. Moreover, the way she presents these poems feels almost like she’s forcing the reader into this space of reception and narration, perhaps to alleviate some of the isolation and abandonment that manifests on the page.
To put it another way, it’s almost like the reader is both Dante and Virgil making their way through Plath, who is the Inferno.
By the time I reached the half-way point through this book, I couldn’t stop. I had to keep reading, had to finish the book, had to read each poem, couldn’t stop myself. It was jarring. I didn’t really know why I felt this way. It was almost a kind of anxiety, a heightened state of awareness of myself and of the poetry and how we were moving around each other. It’s a feeling that begins with the first poem, but builds until the halfway point where, like a dam breaking, it floods off the page and immerses the reader into an almost panic-like emotional state. And it goes almost entirely unacknowledged because it’s mostly implied, never actually focused on or articulated.
I didn’t understand what this was until I read the About Sylvia Plath at the end of the collection and found that she attempted suicide twice, and then attempted suicide a third time and succeeded. I did not know that Plath died from suicide. I also did not know that she had a miscarriage, or that her marriage to Ted Hughes turned sour, to the point that they were, by the time she died, officially separated without any intention of reconciliation. Within these contexts, I understand the urgency, the desperation, the starvation so wildly active in these poems. And I understand why I felt this kind of sense of hurried urgency as I neared the midway point of the book.
Moreover, this collection carries a number of poems she wrote only a few weeks before she killed herself. This is, I think, the urgency that dominates each page being made manifest. And as someone with mental illness who has come very close to attempting suicide in my past, I relate to these feelings of despair and isolation. It was a beautiful, as well as heartbreaking, collection that has left me feeling raw and a little displaced. I feel like I’m grieving not only the end of the book, but the end of Plath herself. I highly recommend this book.
