Great Poets of the Twentieth Century: No. 3 - Sylvia Plath

There are two things that it is almost impossible to avoid mentioning when writing about Sylvia Plath, a fact which tends to constrict discussion of her work. As a result, Plath tends to be treated as a tragedy or a battleground, rather than a poet. This is unfortunate not just because it gets boring, but because it distracts from her work.

And what visceral, unsettling, forceful poetry it is. Plenty of poets turn up the emotional volume or try to unsettle the reader: for all the familiarity that comes with her work's fame, Plath is still unique as a poet who can make me feel physically sick with the strength of what she's writing. Margaret Drabble's comment that she wrote from the body (like her striking opening that 'Sylvia Plath was the first poet to write great poetry about childbirth') is an important observation. She also forces the reader to read from the body, as well. The images are physical and immediate and connected by emotional associations rather than cool logic. (Icy logic, sometimes, yes). It is unfortunately that the term has been so misused (and associated with negative overtones) because her poetry is, in a real sense, hormonal: the all-encompassing emotional response of the body's most forceful way of communicating with itself.

Everything is focussed on maximising her impact: her stripped, pounding verse forms, her reuse of striking imagery, the preponderance of imagery in general. And also, a disturbing habit of using race and racism for shock value. This can leave a nasty taste, for example when in Daddy she identifies with Jews using the most startling stereotypes ('with my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck / And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack / I may be a bit of a Jew'). It's not just T S Eliot who can engage in racial stereotyping, it seems. It should be seen as a part of her method, however. Showing a lack of empathy, yes, but race is used as another shocking image to convey her own emotional horror.

This is just one more way in which her work feels radioactive: energetic, powerful, a defining force of the mid-century and subject to mathematically strict laws of decay. As Beckett said about Joyce's Finnegans Wake:

Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.