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

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

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!

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

“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

Internet letters, my arse!

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.

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