Selected Poems - Sylvia Plath

SELECTED POEMS – SYLVIA PLATH

When you're walking past a shop and there's a box of books outside of it being sold for 10p each and one of them is Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath, you've got to buy it, really – just in case it's a gift from the universe. You never know these days. You never can tell. In a similar fashion, this is how Patti Smith came upon a copy of Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud when she was a teenager, and we all know the profound effect that particular encounter had upon her life from there on. So might Selected Poems do the same?

Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar is a very brilliant book so it might be assumed that a book of poems springing from the same well would also be of some interest. So, is a copy of Selected Poems found in a box on the street really a gift from the universe? Well, not quite. Not in comparison to Illuminations or A Season In Hell by Rimbaud anyway.

So is it even any good at all? Well, if you know nothing of Sylvia Plath then all that you have are the poems, meaning that each one must stand on its own and be judged on its own merit. Beauty, however, is in the eye of the beholder and the quality of art is subjective so that decision can only really be made by the individual reader, dictated I would say by the mood in which the poems are approached at any given time.

If you do know something of Sylvia Plath, however, then what makes the book of interest are the various clues and intimations dotted throughout the poems that tell us where she was mentally and emotionally, though none indicating her soon to come suicide. But then if you know what you're looking for there might well be? In the poem entitled Cut, for example, where she writes of the 'thrill' of slicing into her thumb instead of the onion, then contemplating the blood: 'A celebration, this is. Out of a gap a million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one. Whose side are they on? O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill the thin papery feeling. Saboteur, Kamikaze man.'

I wonder if Ian Curtis ever read Sylvia Plath?

A problem I see with the book is that this selection of poems is edited and chosen by Sylvia's husband, Ted Hughes, whom I hold partially responsible for her suicide. I feel that his presence over the book is a very controlling presence - and that's not a good thing at all.

Sylvia Plath's entire life was always a question of who controls it. Right from her childhood there was a constant battle going on over what kind of person she should be. From her parents, her peers, her teachers, and her doctors; they all wanted Sylvia to conform to their values and their norms. Sylvia, however, had her own thoughts and her own feelings and because they didn't fit in with those held by the society in which she lived, it became an issue.

Sylvia was diagnosed as suffering from depression and to cure her of this was entered into a hospital and given electro-shock treatment which led to her first suicide attempt. Her husband's infidelity led to her final and successful attempt.

I would hazard a guess that during their marriage Ted Hughes also tried to control Sylvia and to bend her to his will. I suspect that for a time she succumbed but his affair shook her to the core and it was this that pushed her over the edge. It's a tragedy, then, that even in death there is a sense of control still being asserted over her in the form of Hughes editing her poems and even choosing which ones should be published.

This is the shadow that hangs over this particular book, unfortunately. The pin that fastens the butterfly to the table. The cage that imprisons the robin redbreast that puts all of heaven in a rage...

John Serpico