Nobody seems to get that the term confessional was coined by a critic of Robert Lowell’s “Life Studies,” intended pejoratively then and used pejoratively now. (One M.L. Rosenthal in 1959.) The poets themselves who have been lumped together never even considered the descriptor. They could have cared less about a critic’s opinion. But the prejudice keeps alive and well.

As for whether or not Plath is a major poet, she can speak for herself. On You Tube I have found five or so links to Plath reciting her own poetry. Go to the links, follow her recitations with each poem on the page open in front of you. Her mastery of diction, rhetoric, metrical stress and musical pause, all the tools in a poet’s bag of tricks immediately, immediately come through. Then, of course, there is the duende her poetry possesses, the one thing without which no amount of verse accomplishment matters.

Plath is a master all right, one whose poetry has had to answer to a certain prejudice against her for longer than John Keats, the Cockney poet, had to endure.

Terreson
Report this comment

I agree, read all of Plath.

Some of her work suffers from obscurity, and sounds like someone with a gift for words with not a whole lot to say.
But she had a gift, there’s no doubt.

I rather prefer some of her so-called juvenilia, which actually has more clarity, such as ‘Never try to trick me with a kiss,’ to her somewhat blandly tricky early and middle periods when ‘respectable’ Plath was writing ‘respectable’ poems for ‘respectable’ journals in the 50s, pleasing the ‘knot-untying’ New Critics with tortured hints of doom over-stuffed into over-half-rhymed conventional stanzas.

“Daddy” was not just an expression of a woman unhinged; it has technical merits (as I mentioned before: the highly inventive, driving, stanza scheme) which surpassed what she was doing before.

There was an unspoken rule among the New Critics (who Plath was naturally in thrall to for a time as an ambitious poet of the 50s) that one should use form, but not jingle too much, and that one should err on the side of complexity rather than clarity; “Daddy” was not only a great big F__ you to her father and Ted but, unconsciously, I think, and driven by her personal despair, a great big F__ you to the tweedy, respectable New Critics: I’ll f*cking jingle and say exactly what I feel if I want.

Thomas
Report this comment

This week’s Prose Feature on Po Daily by Rosanna Warren is a personal piece about how the extreme Ariel poems appealed to her in adolescence and then fizzled for her when she matured. Once again, in that piece, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” are received in deadly earnest, rather than as the darkly humorous dramatic monologues they are. Later, Warren found some other Ariel poems to admire instead; sure, that’s an option — but still the best of Plath’s opus remains, well, unread, it seems, its range and variety unheralded.

I do agree that Plath’s life story has been too much of a driver for her fame. Had Plath survived her final depression, who knows if she would have even kept some of the more extreme Ariel poems, with their suffering, suffering, suffering?

I fear I will go ungently to my grave flailing and screaming, read the entire Plath opus, read, read it!
Report this comment

300+ posts, here. Yes…Sylvia Plath is a major poet, don’t you think?
Report this comment

“Books and horses.” Does that mean a lot of books on horses? I don’t think I could stand it!

Annie,

Woo hoo.

300!

Thomas
Report this comment

Internet letters, my arse!
Report this comment

I was composing a response to Annie’s point about our letters being now inflammable — to the effect that ones & zeroes are actually much easier to burn than paper, & that I doubt we will have to wait long for a huge data crash (might not be such a bad thing where my harried Harriet history is concerned) — when Harriet reverted to its old template, with March 29′s post. The internet has a sense of humor.
Report this comment

http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/video/plath.html

And for fun:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=183617

& some “reception” -

http://www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/plath/daddy.htm

http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Plath.htm
Report this comment

“My brief against Plath was long. In poem after poem, genuine drama devolves into overstatement, a rhetorical boosterism that cancels imaginative trust. [...] Repetition and exaggeration can be artful resources. Over and over, Plath squanders those chances. I wonder if she is responsible for setting into circulation the many counterfeit coins of the word “terrible” which have flooded the market in recent years. Almost every poem of Plath’s suffers from a “terrible,” until the word is no more than a nervous tic: “a terrible fish” (“Mirror”); “the terrible wind” (“Among the Narcissi”); “their terrible faults” (“Berck-Plage”); “more terrible than she ever was” (“Stings”); “the terrible brains” (“Getting There”); “and in truth it is terrible” (“Totem”); and so forth. She is similarly profligate with blood and shrieks.

And yet. I have forsaken my forsaking of Plath. I went back to her, this year, to see how she was keeping. I found her gift to me, this time, to be the opposite of what inspired me in my youth; now it is her deadpan quiet that moves me. Her understatements, her ellipses, her aphoristic compression. These moves—along with her elemental image-making—retain essential drama, and nel mezzo del cammin I find myself chastened and instructed by poems I had long avoided.”

Full article here:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_warren.php
Report this comment

Just think how weird we will all look in the future, our “letters” online; burning any of them will be out of the question . . .
Report this comment

This is a glimpse into a John Crowe Ransom which I’m sure he would rather the world never have seen:

“She had neither birth, subsistence, place, reputation nor friends, and was a very poor little woman indeed”.

Creepy.

Nor Allen Tate, this:

“to save America from the Edna St Vincent Millays”

Not quite as creepy because it could be seen as a mere aesthetic judgment–albeit an poor one.
Report this comment

‘to which John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson also contributed????’ It was THEIR magazine. This article sounds a little dubious, like it was written under the naive impression that every literary credit is an accident.

Graves and Ransom had begun a life-long correspondence before Riding was publised in ‘The Fugitive.’ Tate brought Riding briefly into the fold, but Ransom didn’t like her.

I found this from an essay by Barbara Henning on Riding:

She [Riding] was recognized early on by the Fugitives who published her in their journal and gave her a national award. Allen Tate expressed hope in a letter that Riding would be the one “to save America from the Edna St Vincent Millays”. In a private letter to Tate, however, John Crowe Ransom complained, “She had neither birth, subsistence, place, reputation nor friends, and was a very poor little woman indeed”. Her collaboration with the fugitives was brief; she was too difficult, low class, bohemian and experimental.

‘Save America from the Edna St Vincent Millays???’ This betrays the prejudice, I think, that the ‘little magazine’ modernist school had for those who were truly popular. Hugh Kenner, Pound’s man, also despised Millay, but more publically.

Graves and Riding would go on to write ‘A Survey of Modernist Poetry’ in 1928, essentially covering the poets of ‘The Dial’ clique of the 1920s, Moore, Pound, Eliot, and Cummings.

Riding didn’t stick with the New Critics; Ransom thought her too low-born and experimental, and she, together with Graves, of dropped out of the mainstream modernist poetry scene after a while.

Like Plath, Riding and Millay didn’t fit into the Modernist Men’s Club.
Report this comment

She published poems in The Fugitive, a magazine in Nashville to which John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Donald Davidson also contributed. They found her formidable, a woman of definite and strong opinions.

.

He goes on to compqre her to Salvador Dali.

And Graves’ 1975 Collected is one of my favorite books, though I don’t much like the poems derived from the White Goddess stuff. I blogged about it yesterday.
Report this comment

Wow, Mike, that’s quite a headline about Laura Riding! Reading the article, I discover that she and Robert Graves are credited with founding New Criticism together through a magazine they edited. Who knew! This is certainly not the way most people think of Graves nowadays, when they think of him at all, nor of Riding.

“what presses down on us is true”–
ooo!!
Report this comment

John Crowe Ransom originated the term New Criticism. You begin with the Fugitives/Southern Agrarians around Vanderbilt who were mostly Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, picking up the English scent which T.S. Eliot (same age as Ransom) was following.

The practical element was this: Ransom said criticism needed to be professional and it needed to be learned in the academy. (see Ransom’s 1937 essay “Criticism, Inc.”)

This is crucial. For Ransom and his followers like Allen Tate, journalists and professors who taught literary history were not acceptable as critics of poetry, especially new poetry. Thus began a sea change in the Academy, which sought to train the ‘professional critic.’

One can view Ransom’s move cynically, a takeover of the academy and its little magazines and its subsidy and its classroom laboratories and p.r. etc by a modernist clique who were not getting a lot of genuine popular attention, or as a virtuous attempt to make criticism a science unsuitable for “amateurs,” as Ransom called them. In any case, Ransom and his followers, such as Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Paul Engle (Rhodes Scholar who got the Writers Workshop industry going at Iowa) succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

New Criticism was the conservative, American wing of Modernism which took over the Academy; Pound and William Carlos Williams, for instance, certainly were not able to do what John Crowe Ransom was able to do.

Anyway, this is just one important way of approaching the New Criticism.

After all, when Imagism, and all these silly little manifesto movements led by Pound, fizzled, and he took off for Italy to eventually work for the Axis powers, who do you think kept moving forward in a practical manner? That’s right, the Fugitives, who morphed into the New Critics.

Thomas
Report this comment

And here’s a sidetrip on the New Critics as a boys’ club, a 1991 NYT obituary headline: Laura Riding, 90; Poet and Founder Of New Criticism.
Report this comment

I’m glad you like the discussion.

True, so true. The “oo” sound is “Daddy’s” musical leitmotif; it sort of reminds me of Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” where he intentionally builds “The Raven” around the “or” sound of “nevermore.” Poe understood how important shape, sound, length, duration, repetition, tangible physical properties, contibute to music and the music of poetry, things so obvious they often escape the nuanced poet/reader.

You speak of the oppressive, defining qualities of language. Yes! One uses these qualities to ‘break through.’

Poe knew what presses down on us is true.

Sylvia Plath at last discovered this, too.

Thomas
Report this comment

Like Abby, I’ve never posted on this site before. However,I find this discussion fascinating, and so I’d like to jump in.
Plath is a major poet, in my opinion, because she reworks the possibilities of language. I sense, in her strongest work, a tension played out not only through harrowing subject matter, but through poetic forms.
In the poem “Daddy,” for example, Plath pressures language itself and the roles language plays in establishing, defining, and limiting our culture and our self-identity. The haunting (or childlike, or irritating, or sarcastic, it’s been described many ways) “oo” sound recurs unceasingly throughout the poem. Through that sound, Plath unhinges language from its definitive, contained, oppressive-promoting role, and unleashes its connotative potential. That we are unable to pinpoint the exact effect of the sound is testament to just how liberated the sound becomes in direct defiance of the strained, tense, and highly crafted verse. As Plath releases the potential of sound from the pressures of definitive meaning, she reveals that as much as a society employs language to oppress, trap, and limit identity and reality, inherent within language (in its sound, its rhythm, and its multivalence-in its “poeticness”) is the potential to free identity and reality.
Plath’s work with sound in “Daddy” is just one of the poetic features in that poem she builds upon and redraws. She makes use of rhyme, puns, meter, and other poetic elements and then expands their potential (or highlights it, or puts it into play in such a way that the language itself feels dangerous and new).
The last word of the poem “Daddy,” is the word “through.” Not only does the word offer the last “oo” of the poem, it also, in its potential for multiple readings (I’m through/finished, I’m through/I’ve broken out), reveals that language, and poetic language in particular, is a means of continually re-imagining our selves and our realities.
I haven’t even mentioned her revolutionary work with synecdoche and how it reclaims the possibilities of the body!
Thank you, everyone, for the interesting posts. It’s been fun to read this thread!
Report this comment

I’m blown away by the stanzaic precariousness of “Daddy;” it’s one thing to play with the reader’s expectations of line (which is much easier, since a line is easy to end, or break, and even medicore poets pull that trick all the time) but Plath threatens to kill her stanza-order all through “Daddy” while rescuing it in new ways–I don’t think there’s anything quite like this performance in all of poetry.

Thomas
Report this comment

Irene Praitis’ essay on “Daddy” which I mentioned earlier does a great reading of the rhythmical complexity of the poem and how it works with the meaning on many levels to create something much greater than the surface.

It occurs to me that in Daddy she might be using the conscious artificing of the earlier poems combined with the passion of the later poems, for a powerful combination.

maybe that’s why the poem is so famous and also why you find it feels forced.

personally I don’t mind apparent artifice in poetry in the right circumstances, though sometimes it takes me multiple readings to get below the surface and appreciate the deep power artifice can offer.
Report this comment

You’ve echoed most of the sentiments I’ve already expressed.

I think “Daddy” is her best poem.

And you’re right, and I think I used the same term earlier, ‘She creeps people out.”

Not men, necessarily, “people.” She creeps people out, because when she became a great poet she was going through a harrowing experience which was not fit for children.

Here’s the deal, and here’s what T.S. Eliot and the New Critics were grappling with. Let me put it in real simple terms.

New Criticism is simply another name for the first, real, modern, academic, subtle, rigorous examination of what the hell poetry was, where its appeal lay, what value did it have, etc.

My examination of Plath’s influences is not meant to condemn her or belittle her. She was a professor, she was living in a world of the New Criticism, which was 1) academic, i.e., fusing poetics with a high intellectual charge 2) ambitious, i.e., professors, lecturers, poets were looking out for each other and 3) highly conscious of the ‘great poet’ whose ideal was fading but was still possible.

Shakespeare is a major poet because he appeals to professors and children. A Robert Penn Warren, who lectured at Princeton in 1941 on “Pure and Impure Poetry” can enjoy a play by Shakespeare, but can so can bright, sensitive, 7 year old child.

All sorts of complexities and ironies are presented by Shakespeare in his plays, as well as different types of poetry; the bawdy cynicism of Mercutio sits side-by-side with the sweet verse of the lovers, etc.

Juliet plays New Critic to Romeo when she says, “O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,/that monthly changes in her circled orb”

Robert Penn Warren: “The lady distrusts ‘pure’ poems, nature spiritualized into forgetfulness. She has, as it were, a rigorous taste in metaphor, too; she brings a logical criticism to bear on the metaphor which is too easy…”

Here, in a nutshell is the New Criticism. How does that great, amazing Shakespeare do it? Ah, I see, Juliet is a critic…poetry is criticism, criticism is poetry…

No shame at all in being critically self-conscious in this manner; it is not speculation that those who think most critically are the great poets; it is a truism. Eliot’s criticism made him a great poet.

Shakespeare as playwright had tremendous advantages, however. It is no wonder that Eliot wandered into playwrigting, that Keats wrote a play, that Poe, the poet and critic, succeeded wildly as a short, popular prose writer…

Now, you had all these professors pulling out their hair over lyric poetry. Lyric poetry! You had sophisticated adults adducing what was great in poetry, a self-conscious academic orgy, and it led them all down a path of despair, since how could a professor writing poetry for other professors ever compete with the guys they were studying, like Shakespeare, who could present such complexity in his Romeo, Mercutio, Juliet, his high, his low, his pure, his impure poetry, his ironies, his everything? And a bright 7 year old child can appreciate the wild juxtapositions, since Mercutio is there, right on stage, and then so is Romeo, a few minutes later, with Juliet, all the complexity presented in the form of dramatic persons.

Plath reaches major poet status ONLY when “Daddy” presents a DRAMA in which she is one of the persons in her own harrowing life.

New Criticism was a triumph in its rigor and self-consciousness, but a failure for the same reason; it became an over-analysis because it began to seize upon its own discoveries as profound and worth indulging in; the New Critics forgot Shakespeare and began to love what they had discovered in Shakespeare by taking him apart, and then qualifying this and qualifying that, and finally the pieces lay everywhere, and Academia today has still not put them back together again.

A major poet appeals to the simple, child-like element in humanity.

After the New Criticism, that is impossible. Plath is very much a product of New Criticism; her triumph is that she finally, to some degree, at least, resisted New Critical “resistances.”

Thomas
Report this comment

1) Because no one dares weigh in, for or against?

2) Because Plath was extremely self conscious as a writer, so somehow, fussing over the poetry establishment of the time seems appropriate?

3) ?

I’ve never written on this board before, so I’ll go ahead and stick my neck out.

For me, (and this is mega generalization) Plath’s earlier poems are interesting but overwrought–obviously self-conscious. The diction is amazing and worth study on its own, but it’s as if her perfectionist self worked those poems over so hard, she drained all the life out of them–lost the original impulse, I don’t know. They lack something–spontaneity? Authenticity? They may be clever, but they try too hard and they don’t make me care

UNTIL

around 1961, the hospital poems–”Tulips” (My husband and my child smiling out of the family photo;/Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks) and “The Surgeon at 2am” (Gray faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.)

But there are still self conscious poems and I always put “Daddy” in this category. I know it’s supposed to be some big feminist anthem, but to me it’s just way over the top. I’ve never been able to buy into it.

It’s only at the very end, ’62-’63 when I feel Plath quits caring so much what others will think (though she always always has an audience in mind) and starts writing for herself, or almost becomes detached from herself (generally unhinged) and starts writing anonymously, that I really start to love her. For me, then, she finally becomes human.
But to actually answer the question– OF COURSE SHE’S A MAJOR POET, WHY IS ANYONE EVEN ASKING THIS?

Because–I think she scares the heck out of people, particularly men. She creeps people out. She’s depressing. She has become a cliche of a particular type of poet from a particular time. Her writing is very direct–unfeminine, in the traditional sense (and she occasionally writes about stuff like placentas.) We still have the same situation now–if you’re a powerful, forceful woman, you are a bitch. Voila. Plath was ambitious, unflagging, and (on paper) loud. Brash. Competitive (with her husband! omg.) And very good at what she did. So she was screwed. Ted Hughes’ being part of the Brit establishment certainly couldn’t have helped her reputation in GB. IMO, her work is fascinating and instructive and unique. Everybody’s work is somewhat the product of an era. dwi.
Report this comment

I apologize if I’ve given the impression of denigrating Plath for following the New Critics. This was never my intention.

It is not condescending to say that Plath was influenced by the New Critics. The New Critics were gods during the time when Plath was learning her craft and attempting to succeed as a poet.

Yes, Roethke was very influential mid-century.

Tom,

Robert Lowell’s extraordinary pilgramages to New Critical shrines, aggressively thrusting himself before the tutelage of Tate, Ransom, (leaving Harvard to study with him) Brooks, and Warren is not something to be avoided with a glib, ‘well he was not a New Critic.’ As I’ve said before, New Criticism was the atmosphere these poets swam in; and as much as a critical philosophy can exist, and can be said to be influential, New Criticism was it, and Lowell dove head-first into the pool; obviously one would never point to a line of Lowell’s and say, “Ransom told him to write that,” but if one is unable to see the influence of New Criticism on various writers, and to ponder it as a philosophy which is still influential today, and one must rely on encyclopedias to identify the ‘New Critics,’ (like collecting baseball cards) then one simply does not belong in a discussion such as this.

This is not to say that the New Criticism is perfect; far from it, nor am I saying that personalities and cliques and ambition were not a factor among these men and their followers, but that’s for another discussion.

Thomas
Report this comment

When I read back and saw how that discussion started–the way the New Critics were first brought in as a way of condescending to The Colossus–I regretted a portion of my post.

When I said that it seemed Plath was writing for literary close readers, the type of reader represented by the New Critics at that time, I didn’t mean that in any condescending way. And I don’t think The Colossus a journeywork at all, but a strong and marvelous book.

Just for the record.

Roethke, by the way, is one of those rare male poets who, like Poe and Longfellow, had a strong, real interaction with, respect for, and influence on women poets—and not just female poets who happen to be women, but female poets who identify with women’s poetic tradition. For that matter, he has influenced me quite a bit also.
Report this comment