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

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

THE BELL JAR - SYLVIA PLATH

...And then a few weeks before being published under a pseudonym in 1963, Sylvia Plath closed all the windows in her kitchen and sealed the gaps around the doors with wet towels, turned on the gas and stuck her head in the oven. A few months earlier, Sylvia had left her husband, poet Ted Hughes, after discovering he was having an affair with Assia Wevill, the wife of a fellow poet. A few years later, Assia Wevill also committed suicide using exactly the same method as Sylvia.

It might seem an obvious or even a stupid thing to say but you don't know how good The Bell Jar is until you read it. It's no great revelation to say, even, that it's brilliant.

As the years go by, perceptions change but the song, however, remains the same. In reading The Bell Jar from the vantage point of 2016 it's relatively easy to argue that Sylvia Plath wasn't 'crazy' in the slightest and in fact her reaction to the world around her was a perfectly understandable one. It could even be argued that even though it was by her own hand that she took her life, Sylvia Plath was in actual fact murdered - not by any one individual but by the world.

A lot of contempt has been poured upon Ted Hughes since Sylvia's death and justifiably so I would say. He knew what Sylvia was like and how she was, so what effect did he think his affair might have upon her? He is guilty in my eyes of being an accomplice to manslaughter. So too is the doctor who first administered electric shock treatment to Sylvia. If he had been doing his job properly he wouldn't have so readily administered ECT and in such a high 'dose'.

From what I know of ECT (and I've been reliably informed) it's still not fully understood what happens to the brain after being zapped by electricity. It's like throwing a rock into a pool. You see the splash and the ripples but you can't see where that rock goes once it's under the surface of the water. You can't see what it might disturb once it hits the bed of the pool.

Many people view ECT as being barbaric whilst others have proclaimed the benefits of it. Sylvia Plath's case would seem to fall into both schools of thought. On reading The Bell Jar it's apparent her initial treatment had an entirely negative effect and led to her first suicide attempt. When administered later in much gentler doses and under 'caring' supervision, the treatment has a more positive effect, lifting 'the bell jar' under which she's been trapped.

Sylvia's thoughts and feelings regarding the execution of the Rosenbergs are absolutely intelligent and sane ones. Famously, it's how The Bell Jar begins: 'It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York'. She then goes on to say: 'It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world'.

From this, to Sylvia ending up (against her will) being given electroconvulsive therapy is nothing less than tragic. Criminally tragic.

The subject of the Rosenbergs comes up again later on in the book when on the evening of their execution, Sylvia (or rather, her alter ego in the book) says to a fellow student intern 'Isn't it awful about the Rosenbergs?' Her fellow intern agrees: 'Yes! It's awful such people should be alive. I'm so glad they're going to die'.

This isn't, of course, what Sylvia meant when she posed the question but it speaks volumes and leaps out from the page as an indication of where Sylvia is in relation to society and where all the other people around her are.

Just because she's estranged from the prevailing orthodoxy and social mind-set, does it mean that she's wrong? Of course not. In actual fact, depression (which is what Sylvia falls into) is a very sane response to such circumstances. As Freud said, anxiety is the only real emotion. Add to this the generally confusing times that she was growing up in, what with the cold war, patriarchy, conservatism, male oppression, the sexual revolution and so on, Sylvia's reaction is perfectly reasonable.

Much later on in the book, after Sylvia's mother suggests they can act as though her time in the asylum was just a bad dream, Sylvia comes to understand that 'To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream'.

This is the point at which it's clear that Sylvia is on her way to freedom and to becoming her own woman. The point at which she is on the way to recognising the beat of her own heart that throughout the book has been saying to her: 'I am, I am, I am...'

John Serpico