The voluminous critical conversation
about Sylvia Plath has tended to orbit a few topics: her suicide, of
course, and the ways mental illness and madness perhaps predicted her
death and marked her poetry; the blazing ferocity of her posthumous
masterpiece Ariel; the co-opting of images and metaphors (from
the Holocaust, for instance) in those late poems; and the overall
relationship of her biography to her supposedly confessional poems,
especially when it comes to Ted Hughes, his affair with Assia Wevill,
and his curation of Plath’s legacy after her death. These are all
compelling topics, and they’ve had a deep and lasting effect on how we
read Plath’s poetry. But I prefer to think about Plath’s amazing poems
and the creative surges that enabled her to write them.
In Plath we have a unique example of rapid, surging development of a
poet’s art. In only seven years—from 1956, when the first poems in her Collected Poems
were written, to 1963, the year of her death—Plath went from being an
obviously talented and excruciatingly ambitious (as her journals attest)
apprentice poet with lots of technique and intensity but few real
subjects on which to train those powers, to the author of unprecedented
works of genius. In Plath’s first book, The Colossus and Other Poems,
the only book of poetry she published in her lifetime, we have an
unusual opportunity to pinpoint the moments when her art surges forward
in particular poems—we can actually watch her grow as an artist, see a
little bit how the magic trick was done, and perhaps learn from it.
Plath’s earlier poems have a lot to teach about how poets expand their
capacities, how they “find” a voice by listening closely to their own
minds, and how genius can be, if not made, then at least willfully
courted.
Plath was a poet who developed by breakthrough. She worked at poetry
as a craftsperson, a wildly driven one; she sat down every day and made
herself write, and churned the products of her writing until they became
fulfilled poems. In his introduction to her Collected Poems,
Hughes writes, “To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic
efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked
on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd
verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was
artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was
quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was
not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily
exhausted her ingenuity.” Hughes’s characterization of Plath as an
artisan feels accurate: even in her minor poems, there’s a sense of
rightness that pops up at times when the language seems to click into
place.
There are no rough edges in Plath’s early work: all of it feels worked over.
The poems feel distinctly like aesthetic objects, like word sculptures
designed to provoke particular responses in their readers. Whatever
Plath encounters in her early poems—a landscape, a creature, a
phenomenon of weather, a person out of a mythical past—she renders with
exhaustive intensity and precise laborious description. Few poems go by
without the inclusion of obscure words—“skinflint trees”; “faces /
Lucent as porcelain”; “A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback.” Of
course we marvel at the ease with which she deploys her considerable
vocabulary— and the poems are, always, beautiful—but these
words, and so many of the flowery descriptions, seem to be there, in
part, to impress, or for the fun of using a new tool she has discovered
in her toolbox. Plath is testing herself, but the early poems mostly
show a virtuosity of technique rather than of emotion. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-moment-sylvia-plath-found-her-genius/
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen