Chapter 7 - Sylvia Plath: Being Christlike

Summary

Spending equal time with Hughes’s poetry, especially Birthday Letters, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose, this chapter examines how the Christological ideas at work in so much of Hughes’s other poetry applies to the life, literary output and tragic death of his first wife. We watch as the Edenic template of the fall repeats in Hughes’s depictions of Plath. Close attention is also paid to Plath’s “Pursuit,” with additional contributions from Yeats and Stevens, setting up a pattern of continual intertextuality. Plath’s foundering efforts to manage and restore her unfallen, divine self produce a range of fascinating effects in both her writing and Hughes’s. These particularly center on a body of landscape poetry written during the couple’s two-year stay in America, and reference is made to the work of artists Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. The most explicitly Christological of Hughes’s Birthday Letters poems are discussed, and the argument made that his efforts to understand what happened to Plath in terms of a “symbolic death and rebirth” send him continually, though never with total satisfaction, to the Christian template.