6 - The poetry of Sylvia Plath

Summary

Sylvia Plath produced one of the most riveting poetic oeuvres in English. Her poems reveal a perspective and a language use that are utterly unique. Yet they are also related to the Renaissance, Romantic, modernist and Cold War rhetorics she inherited and to the postmodernism that her work helped to generate through both positive and negative example. Plath's poems seethe with anger, hope, desire and disappointment. They glow with brilliant turns of phrase: 'What is so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit's cry may be wilder / But it has no soul' ('Kindness'). They construct breathtaking images of the injured body and psyche - the 'trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl' of 'Cut', for example. And they evoke their social and political milieu in a telling way, expressing the dilemmas of a woman enmeshed in a sexist, racist and classist social structure, yearning for affirmation, 'waist-deep in history'. Plath's poems plunge into the contradictions of mid-twentieth century Anglo-American selfhood and culture. Written within a remarkably brief timespan, they emanate a heat and light that can still combust a reader today.