The Poetry of Silvia Path #24

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course Literature. And today we're going to
talk about the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Ugh, I heard
she's like the patron saint of sad teenage girls. Well, me from the past, once
again you're prejudging an author based on what you've heard rather than
what you've actually read. I know this, because I used to be you, and I am
keenly aware of the fact that you have not actually read Sylvia Plath. So, let's
actually read some poems before trying to convince everyone about how
smart we are. So, Sylvia Plath is often described as a feminist poet, writing
about the plight of women before women's rights were a mainstream idea.
Like, essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote "At her brutal best -- and Plath is a
brutal poet -- she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic voice
into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence." And you though the
Hulk was the only raving avenger. No, there is also 'The Plath!' And there is
no question that Plath's feminism is extremely important to her poetry, but
she also wrote about a lot of day-to-day experiences and made them
significant through her use of metaphor and simile. Former American poet
laureate Robert Pinsky said her poems "throw off images and phrases with
the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide
open." Like, here's part of her poem "Cut," which she wrote about cutting
her thumb while cooking. "What a thrill --- My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead
white. Then that red plush." So, she takes a commonplace experience and
turns it into something more, and that's one of the hallmarks of a great
poem. You can relate to it even though you've never considered the
particular subject in that particular way. Like, you understand how she's cut
herself, and you can picture the piece of skin like a hat or a scalp on her
finger. You know what the red plush looks like and the dead white, and you
can almost feel it. But while you can relate to it, the imagery is also sort of
disorienting. I mean this is a poem that begins "What a thrill." And I think
some of us can relate to that feeling that injury or destruction can be kind of
thrilling. It's not a healthy thing; it's not something we want to romanticize,
but it is true. So, let's talk about Sylvia Plath's biography in the 'Thought
Bubble.' Plath was born in 1932 in Boston. Her father was an entomologist
and wrote a book about bees, which would be the subject of many of Plath's
later poems. Her mom was a first generation American pursing a master's in
teaching when she met Plath's father. Sylvia published her first poem at the
age of eight. Her father died that same year. She was a good student and
attended Smith College and was awarded a summer internship at
Mademoiselle Magazine. The internship was the inspiration for her
wonderful novel The Bell Jar. She said she looked back at the experience as
though looking through a bell jar, which distorted it into a work of fiction.
The book tells us the tale of a woman who finds herself unable to enjoy her
summer in the city and all the perks that come with her internship. When
she returns home, her mother sees her depression and takes her to a
doctor, who treats her extensively with electric shock therapy. She
continues to get worse until a benefactor pays for her to go to a private
hospital where she is treated appropriately and gets well enough to leave
the hospital and go back to school. In real life, Plath's first suicide attempt
was in 1953. She crawled underneath her house and took her mother's
sleeping pills and said later that she was "blissfully succumbed to the
whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion." But she
survived at graduated from Smith and then went on to win a Fulbright
scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge where she met Ted
Hughes, a poet whose work she admired. They married a few months later
and found a mutual interest in astrology and the supernatural and a mutual
admiration for each other's work. In 1962, Plath discovered that Hughes was
having an affair and they separated. Later that year, she experienced a
creative burst and wrote a book's worth of poems. And then, in February of
1963, she took her own life. She was only 30. Thanks, Thought Bubble. Oh, it
must be time for the open letter! Abe Lincoln?! All right, an open letter to
suicide. Dear Suicide, you are a permanent response to a temporary
problem, and you are a solution to nothing. I just want to say that at the
outset, there is nothing good or romantic about you, Suicide. You are a
tragedy. You are also, in almost all cases, preventable. Abe Lincoln had
periods of intense, paralyzing depression throughout his life, and he became
the best president of the United States ever in history, except for Franklin
Pierce. I'm kidding, Franklin Pierce. You were the worst. There is a
correlation between depressive personalities and creativity, but people who
are suffering from paralyzing depression don't create anything. So, it's very
important to me when we talk about a writer whose life ended with suicide
that we note that people survive depression. And also that Sylvia Plath
wasn't a good writer, because she eventually committed suicide. In fact, her
career was cut short and I mourn all of the many wonderful books we
might've had. In short, Suicide, I don't like to say mean things, but you suck.
Best wishes, John Green. Okay, so Sylvia Plath became the first person to
posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book The Collected
Poems, published in 1981. But she's best known for Ariel, a collection of
poems written in something of a poetic frenzy in the months before she
died, and published in 1965. Robert Penn Warren called Ariel "a unique
book, it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as
though somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night." In
the introduction to Ariel, Robert Lowell says that in this book "...Plath
becomes herself...everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned
on its head. The voice is now cooly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful,
girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire." So here
are a couple excerpts from one of Plath's most famous poems, Lady Lazarus.
You can hear me read the whole thing here. "Dying Is an art, like everything
else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call. It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy
enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical Comeback in broad day To
the same place, the same face, the same Brute Amused shout: ‘A miracle!'
That knocks me out." "Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men
like air." The poem is brutal, and angry, and morbid. It involves a lot of
corpses. But it's also a poem of empowerment, and in a weird way, it's kind
of hopeful. It's the kind of hard, one hope that you can take with you no
matter how difficult things get. Lazarus, of course, refers to the Bible story of
Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. She's imagining herself as rising from
the dead, because she lived through a suicide attempt. And throughout the
poem, she uses repetition and rhyme so that you can't look away from these
things that are difficult to face. Every time your mind starts to wander,
there's a rhyme that sucks you back in. And then there are the line breaks,
which are really fascinating in this poem. So, when I was a kid, I though that
you look a three or four second pause at the end of every line of poetry. And
that may be the case in many Shel Silverstein poems, but it's definitely not
the case in many Sylvia Plath poems. Now, like when proper poets read from
their poetry, they read it all so slowly that they can afford to take a full
breath at the end of each line. But you should treat a line break as some
kind of punctuation, like maybe it reads as a comma. Maybe it just means
there's a stronger emphasis on the word before or after the line break. One
of the pleasures of reading poetry for me is that I kind of get to be the co-
creator of the poem by making choices about how to read it. Sylvia Plath
wrote in her journal once that she felt as though she lived two extremes:
"joyous positive and despairing negative." And we see both in her poems.
Like in "Letter in November," she gives us a glimpse of the joyous positive.
"...I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous, I am so stupidly
happy..." And we've all felt puffed up with happiness, and she finds brilliant
words to describe the feeling just as it is, but I also think there's something
else going on here. There's a longstanding idea that women should be quiet
and small, right? Like when I'm on an airplane, men usually sit like blueergh,
and God forbid if a woman takes an armrest on an plane! Anyway, in that
sense, allowing yourself to become enormous with happiness is a kind of
countercultural action. Instead of enormity being, like, 'unwomanly,' it
becomes the perfect and most wonderful thing for a woman to be. So, Sylvia
Plath was influenced by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H.
Lawrence, but also by Emily Dickinson. And if you watched our episode on
Dickinson last year, you'll see that influence. They both share a
preoccupation with death, but they also both write from the perspective of
women who find themselves trapped by lack of opportunity. So along poets
like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath is often seen as a member of the
'Confessional School of Poetry.' This so-called poetry of the 'I' dealt directly
with trauma and with relationships, and these poems were often
autobiographical. But vitally, they weren't just recording their emotions on
paper and then just inserting line breaks and rhymes. Confessional poetry
isn't just about capturing the 'self', it's also a kind of remaking the 'self'.
That's one of the great things about writing. And "Lady Lazarus" is actually a
really good example of this. I mean, in that poem, the narrator dies, but
then is slowly reformed. The last poem I want to talk about today is "Tulips,"
the poem that was included in Ariel, although though it was written much
earlier than most of the poems in the book. It was about a hospital stay in
which she was recovering from an appendectomy. "The tulips are too
excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how
snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself Quietly As the light
lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing
to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the
nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They
have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye
between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take
everything in." For me, this idea of "two white lids that will not shut" is
central to my understanding of humanity and our ineradicable hope. Plath is
trying to give up and just lie still in the absolute white, but those two
exciting tulips are pulling her back into the world. Everything is white and
quiet and snowed-in, but those tulips, we read, are "too red...they hurt me."
This poem, for me at least, captures the difficulty of being a person, but also
what's rewarding about being a person. We are called to attentiveness even
when it's painful. I think Sylvia Plath often gets a bad rap precisely because
her poetry resonates with teenagers. And I think it's a little bit unfair. Yes,
there are times when she romanticizes death and self-injury, and I don't like
it when she does that. But there is astonishing emotional authenticity in
her poems, and she manages it without irony. And that incredible frankness
in Plath's writing is what I think makes it endure. It all feels true. Her focused
observation of the world around her, the pupil that has to take everything
in, that was a great gift to us because by keeping her eyes open as long as
she did, she helped us to keep ours open.