Sylvia Plath's life and poetry
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Sylvia Plath's life and poetry are strongly and clearly related. But critical focus on the biographical element in her work tends to diminish the standing of her poetry. Those who attempt to read the life through the poems are proceeding contrary to what Plath intended and what she deserves. This does not mean, of course, that knowledge of Plath's life is valueless or that it will not sometimes enhance some readings of the poems. It only means that the poems in Ariel, for instance, were written to be read by readers who knew little about the lives of Plath, Hughes, or anyone they knew. In the wake of Plath's death, of course, it is nearly impossible to become the ideal reader for whom the poems were planned. But critics of all kinds have gradually come to see that it is the work rather than the life that matters--or, at least, that while both may matter they cannot be judged by each other. Feminist critics, for example, have been easily distracted by the facts of Plath's life. But a review of essays by a number of feminist critics shows how the criticism has progressed from lamenting that Plath died too soon to be saved by feminism to analyzing the poetry in terms of gender issues raised by her work. If biographical questions have only extremely limited relevance to understanding Plath's poetry then it should be possible to read the works without such information. Ironically it is a poem such as "Daddy," where biographical information is often seen as very importa
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on with Plath has been so strong that questions about autobiography and poetry have dominated discussions of her work to the detriment of literary analysis. As Marsack describes this long-term trend, generally women readers and critics "have felt that if [Plath] had been able to hang on--with the help of good female friends--she might have discovered an identity she could live with as the women's movement gained strength in the decade that followed her death" (Marsack 87).
Needless to say, had feminist criticism remained mired in this kind of approach there would be little to say about it. But it is important to note that such criticism was not really distinct from that of any other practitioners of "the convention of reading her poems, at face value, as autobiographical [or] confessional" and as constituting a type of discourse which "'owns up to' the truth of the author's life and personality" (Tripp 253). Tripp, who deals primarily with the poem "I Am Vertical" from 1961, makes the telling point that by concentrating on the "I" as a signal to begin to fit the poem into what readers know of Plath's life, these readers miss the surface wit of the fact that the letter "I" is, indeed, vertical. This, in turn, leads to the ass
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Approximate Word count = 2871
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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