Chapter 9 - Plath and the Lyric

Summary

Lucy Tunstall provides readers with a crucial understanding of Plath’s conception of the lyric. Tunstall brings alive Plath’s continuous, deliberate interventions in the lyric mode’s possibilities and limits. She situates Plath’s development of the lyric in the poet’s childhood and College influences and traces it through to the Ariel poems and their seemingly incompatible registers. Tunstall shows us not just the unsurprising engagement with sound and voice, but with the visual, too, in Plath’s unique conceptions of the lyric. Finally, Tunstall confronts the difficult questions raised by Plath’s treatment of race in the context of her obsessive exploration of ideas of purity.