"'Rook' Errant: The Sophistications of Sylvia Plath's Early Voice"

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Sylvia Plath's poetry is at times tortuous: she practiced her craft with deliberacy and seriousness, and the complexity and difficulty of her life is often painfully registered in her writing. Yet her poetry at times also reflects a joie de vivre that enlivens and responds with whimsy and humour to these travails. In 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather' we see something of this: her experimenting with form in order to render a response to a particular instance of the natural world; the rook that is arrivant, that is harbinger of fleeting meeting. What is most arresting in this, my favourite of her poems, is her tone: the tongue-in-cheek sass of her relation with the bird and the context which casts it up in a sublime light.

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2018

Based on the archival evidence of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s annotations to Sylvia Plath’s 1971 collection Winter Trees, as well as a 1972 typescript of Forrest-Thomson’s review of Winter Trees, which she never published, this article argues that Forrest-Thomson’s engagement with Plath’s late poetry played a crucial role in the development of her theory of ‘poetic artifice’. Yet I contend that the poems of Winter Trees by no means offer themselves as self-evident exemplars of such a theory, and I explore this disjunction by juxtaposing Forrest-Thomson’s revisionary account of Plath in Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, which posits the poems ‘Daddy’ and ‘Purdah’ as anti-confessional works of art that clearly indicate their own ‘unreality’, against the Winter Trees review, which is more critical of Plath’s ‘compromises’. Because Forrest-Thomson’s aesthetic project is further complicated by her own development as a poet, I also consider a selection of poems published in the 1974 Omens Poetry Pamphlet Cordelia: or ‘A poem should not mean but be’, in order to explore an elided, yet suggestive, relation between feeling and theory in her poetry. Finally, I argue that this relation, which Plath’s ‘Purdah’ would seem to both prefigure and sanction, signals the presence of a reticent ‘linguistic emotionality’ in Forrest-Thomson’s work that not only contests the authority of her male modernist models, but also anticipates contemporary critical discourses in experimental poetry and poetics.

2006

The aim of this article is to give an insight into the use of the echo or repetition in the poetry of the American poet Sylvia Plath. The echo or repetition covers most of the poems of the poetic volume Ariel, but many questions arise on the use of this technique by Plath. There are different opposing viewpoints that discuss the fact if this technique was used deliberately or not. The reason of using it is most appropriately given by the psychological approach. According to Freud's case-stories, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", repetitions are done unconsciously and are related to isolation. In most of her poems Plath shows the speaker entrapped in the cage of her mind and in the state of a child, this is also shown by the fact that she continuously repeats words or phrases. Plath, herself, was very addicted to Freud and Jung and very often found herself in their case-stories. Repetitions are mostly used during the last years of Plath's life during which she became one with the speaker of her poems and this was a way of expressing and controlling her anger in the "shriek" poems. This technique is part of the rebirth and transcendence poems, which are symbols of repetition.

Textual Practice, 2006

Iperstoria, 2021

Sylvia Plath's posthumously published Ariel has generated a plethora of responses. While critics have tended to focus on the biographical aspects of the poet's work, lay reviewers have simultaneously emphasised their lack of understanding and the strength of their perceptual and affective responses. The present article, which focuses on Plath's "Elm," has a threefold aim. First, it seeks to present "Elm" as a work of verbal art; secondly, it endeavours to expose the features which may be responsible for readers' responses; thirdly, it considers the potential of "Elm" for mental health. To this end, the study mobilises concepts and methods drawn from stylistics, (Systemic Functional) Discourse Analysis, psychology, and philosophy. Research findings show that the following features may allow for an internally lived rather than an externally cognised aesthetic experience: the dissolution of the signifier-signified pair, the use of intersensoryphysiognomic language and the introduction of atopia as a topos. These salient features enable readers to privilege significance over signification and to be confronted with jouissance, an experience that grounds them in the flow of (be)coming.

International Journal of Aquatic Science ISSN:2008-8019, 2021

Very few things in literary history have created an impact that has been associated with the suicide of Sylvia Plath. The sad circumstances that have preceded and followed her death have made it even more sinister and intriguing and their shadows have cast a huge veil of uncertainty and darkness which have within no time created a literary and cultural polarization. It also side-lined the modern poetry movement which was just picking up its lost reins after the second world war. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes should have played a major role in such a revival. On the other hand, a whole generation of literary critics, writers, biographers, and social enthusiasts have focussed more than due attention to biographical details that do not contribute much to literary biography. They were engaged in a battle to establish or bring to light the gross injustice that has been perpetrated against an innocent girl trapped in a wedlock.

2017

The life and work of Sylvia Plath has been of great interest since her suicide in 1963. While her poems and short stories had been published in a variety of journals and magazines before her death, it was not until the posthumous release of Ariel that Plath's true depths were discovered by a large audience and she gained popular acclaim. Critics now claim that The Colossus and Other Poems was Plath's discovery of her own voice and her taking on of "the world of what is important to her" (Kendall 9), but that it is Ariel that unrepentantly reveals Plath's true emotions (Butscher 341). The "Sylvia 1 " identity that arose from the ashes of Plath's suicide was someone new to critics and friends alike-as Bere says, there are "obvious discrepancies between the [public] Sivvy of the letters 'singing' her 'native joy of life' and the violent, destructive poet of Ariel" (Wagner-Martin 61); however, there is something undeniably real about the "Sylvia" that appears in Ariel. The Ariel Sylvia was not the put-together Sylvia that would have tea in one's living room nor the doting daughter who would write letters home from England nor Hughes's Sylvia who "had a great capacity for happiness" (Becker 48). Instead, Ariel's "Cut," "Edge," and "Daddy" focus on death, hatred, and pain-not topics someone "remorselessly bright and energetic" (Butscher 341) would fixate on. While some artists have placed their identity farther from their work, Plath is known for her confessional style poetrya form of poetry which, according to Steven Gould Axelrod, consists of three essential elements: "an undisguised exposure of painful personal event. .. a dialectic of private matter with public matter. .. and an intimate, unornamented style" (Axelrod 98). Unlike other styles of poetry that are set apart by form or specific themes, confessional poetry is defined by the author's "expression of personal pain" such as "destructive family relationships; traumatic childhoods; broken marriages; recurring mental breakdowns; alcoholism 1 "Sylvia" refers specifically to Plath's identity, whether that be a false or true identity. It does not speak to Plath's work or legacy, but rather, who she was as a person. Daly 3 or drug abuse" (Collins 197). Born out of feelings of lost individuality that arose in the 1950s and 60s, confessional poetry aimed to "embody the individual perception in direct ways," setting itself apart from previous forms because "rather than creating masks or different personae, they [confessional poets] began to speak from a position which was unambiguously their own" (Collins 199). For these reasons, writing confessional poetry requires an understanding of one's own suffering, along with an ability and willingness to capture that personal pain in an honest and vulnerable form of poetry-after all, it has been coined "confessional poetry" because it requires that the author "confess" painful truths regarding him or herself. A single glance at poems such as "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" shows that Plath was a textbook example of the confessional poether writing (especially at the end of her life) focused on her own painful struggles with loss, a dying marriage, mental illness, and other challenging areas of her life. One such autobiographical poems is "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," a poem that discusses Plath's actual experience of answering the phone and having her husband's lover ask to speak to him. The poem describes the speaker receiving a call from an unnamed individual who asks, "Is he here?" It is a seemingly harmless question, but the poems describes the words as "plopping like mud," implyingin a heavy-handed fashionthat there is something about these words in this context that is dirty and sullies the speaker's home. The speaker then asks, "how shall I ever clean the phone table?" (Plath, Collected Poems, 202), bringing to light the speaker's desire to clean her household of the incident, which she considers to be filthy and unhealthy. It also demonstrates a hopelessness that this stain could ever be removed from them, as the speaker finds no answer for how to clean the phone table. As is typical of confessional poems, there is very little masking of the real-life event in this poem, and the speaker is not invented, but rather is interchangeable with Plath herself. Just like the speaker Daly 4 in the poem, Plath historically answered the phone in 1962 only to have Assia, Hughes' lover, ask her "Is he here?" about Plath's husband. As demonstrated by "Words heard, by accident, over the phone" above, Plath adopted a very personal style of poetry, tying her poems to her identity in a way that many authors would not dare, and bringing her identity into the spotlight with the success of Ariel. Like "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," countless other poems by Sylvia Plath including "Suicide off Egg Rock," "Edge," and "Cut" are inspired by her experiences. For this reason, it can become easy to view her poems as biography or fact, when they are actually creative works. While it is true that Plath's poems are often emotionally relevant to her, the emotions that she conveys were never meant to be expressed as singularly her own. Rather, she intended to write poetry that would echo both her own emotions and the emotions of her audience. The sheer number of drafts

According to Stephen Spender, in a confessional autobiography, the writer aims to tell the truth about the person he knows most intimately about, which is the author himself. The writer’s only criterion is then telling the ultimate truth, however, there is no verification that the truth revealed is the only version of truth. The truth revealed then fits perfectly with the author’s image of the self. Also, the confessional form demands that the confession be made to a confessor (Spender, 121). In Plath’s work, she channels her autobiographical details to form commentary of various issues, which are both personal and at the same time, a concern of the broader context. The confessor receiving her confession is the reader, who judges Plath’s proclamation with his/her own contextual moral yardstick.

Virtutis Incunabula, 2016

This study is a descriptive literary analysis aimed to appreciate and evaluate the four selected poems of American author Sylvia Plath using the Psychoanalytic Approach in literary criticism. The said approach in evaluating and interpreting literature is based on the theories of Psychoanalysis founded by Sigmund Freud, as well as from other theories from other schools of thought in psychology. The poems, chosen based on the publication and creation dates, underwent literary analysis and criticism using the Psycho-criticism model of Charles Mauron. The said process includes close reading of the materials, locating symbolisms and metaphors, interpreting symbols akin to a dream-like sequence, juxtaposing symbols and literary devices, and synthesizing common and recurring themes. Another methodology used in the study is the process of three C's for data analysis by Marilyn Lichtman. The process mentioned above synthesized the recurring and common themes of the selected poems. Description, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and interpretation were conducted using quantitative data derived from Plath's posthumously published poetry anthology, Ariel. The analysis showed the author's creative process as strong implications of Electra complex, manifestations of fear and desire concealed through symbolisms and metaphors, and obvious tendencies to feminism. Further recommendations for the study include analysis of local and contemporary authors and a sample lesson plan in teaching literature while integrating behavioral and humanistic studies. The study advocates a more in-depth understanding of how literature works in a psychological point of view, a more humanistic view in interpreting and appreciating literary works, and an opportunity for an inter-disciplinary approach in research.