Sylvia plath

 October 27 1932 - february 11 1963

 Massachusetts
 Father - prof of biology and german - specialisation in bees (find this in her poetry)
o Died when plath was 8 after complications with a foot amputation due to
diabetes
o Mistreated as lung cancer
o Pivotal event in her life
o Declared that she would never speak to god again
o Had mother sign a form that she would never marry again
 Mother - 21 years younger than father. Masters degree in education
 First poem written at age 8
 First poem sold to 17 magazine
 Winner of fiction contest in 1952
 Suffered from periods of intense depression
 Attempted suicide at age 21 - only nearly a success - overdose of sleeping pills and
crawled into space under house. Found three days later when she coughed on her
vomit after throwing up the pills
 Psychiatric hospitalisation experiences are used for inspiration for the bell jar -
published 2 weeks before her suicide - autobiographical novel
 Graduates from smith college with highest honours
 Scholarship to cambridge - Massachusetts
 Met ted hughes in 1956
 Married four months later
 Extremely hyperbolic description of meeting
 First collection: the colossus 1960
 Daughter - freeda
 Son - nicholas
 Marriage allowed for very intense creative partnership
 Marriage also source for conflict
 Ted hughes has an affair in 1962 and they separate - new phase of poetic career, no
longer bound by convention.
 Moved to london in 1963 with children
 New wave of depression and publishes the bell jar
 Locked kids upstairs and killed self with gas stove
 Won pulitzer prize posthumously (first one to do so)

Poetry

 Centered on a divided selfhood

 Hunger for biographical revelation influence how poetry is read
o Not seen as fictional but as reliable historical documents
o Sources of details about relationships with father and husband
o "As blood stains of a murder scene" - judith kroll
o Predicates that work is autobiographical (confessional poet) - not accurate
o Ted hughes claims she is not a confessional poet - "sets them up like masks"
 Inserts personal details and absorbs them into an impersonal overarching narrative
  Primarily Not literal and confessional, but rather the articulation of a mythic system
which integrates all aspects of her work and into which autobiographical and
confessional details are shaped and absorbed - judith kroll
 Plath's world is complete and self contained - unlike confessional poetry
 Rebirth - is the only thing that could change/influence her sealed future/stasis
 Obsession with transcendence is an attempt to overcome divided selfhood
 Speakers of poems often mourn loss of father - wish to bring him back - his identity
will fulfill their identity.
 Yearn for metaphorical death that will bring them into life
 Caught in death-in-life they crave life-in-death of false self
 Drive towards enlargement
 Frazer - golden bough and graves - the white goddess give her a framework for her
narrative
 Turns father into god in decline, she becomes the mourning goddess - longer for the
return of the god

Electra on azalea path:

 Expresses what is to come

 Articulation of divided self
 Biographical underpinning - visit to father's grave
 Mix of psychoanalysis and ancient greek mythology
o Plath was psychoanalysed herself
o Supply narrative framework
o God in decline, mourning goddess (father and daughter)
o Mournful, nostalgic, elegiac tone (elegy - lament for the dead)
o Speaker in suspended mournful state
o Electra
 Daughter of agamemnon -
 Complex - in competition with mother for love of father
o Azalea
 Path to grave
 Flower known for beauty but also poison
 Desire to make more of biographical details
 Stanza 1
o She died along with her father - divided selfhood
o Becomes underground servant of the god
o Like bees - dad was specialised in bees
o Visit to grave makes her aware that she had died as well
o Easy to make of father and abstract distant god
o Visiting his grave makes him relatable and holds key to her identity
o Guilt - that she is about to assume with this electra complex
o Self that survives - false self
 Stanza 2
o Always been a desire to mythologise father
o Father frozen as abstract notion - death wasnt an active problem in her life
o Necropolis - city of the dead - graveyard
 o Meets reality of the death - insulting to her
 Stanza 3
o Charity ward - distaste for reality
o Sobering experience
o Torn away from abstract
o Biographical reality - extreme details - desire to make more of what is there is
truer than reality
o Mythologised drama is more realistic than the real
o Ersatz - inferior replacement
o Reality is offensive - myth more important
o Redness of dye - suggests guilt
 Stanza 4
o Italics - forcefully wedged in
o Expressing self as electra
o Enters dialogue with greek myth
o Speaker reecognises the distance between herself and electra
o "Truth" - omen of terrifying things to come. Still mythologising - not really
truth - absolute drive to reject mundane nature of reality
 Stanza 5
o Willfully invoking a drama
o Great sense of abandonment
o Died like any man - normal mere mortal - rejects the mundane
o Ghost of suicide - dead and alive at the same time - real self is dead with
father. False self is living on
o Electra complex is here acknowledged and assumed
o Pseudo mythic role assumed

The Beekeepers Daughter

 Father emerges as priest/king

 Unnatural lushness - unnatural incestuous union
 Heart under your foot - total submission
 Ritual in a sacred grove - wedding
 Marries him in his decline - crumbling
 Stanza 1
o Garden of mouthings - sensuality and sexuality
o Unnatural lushness - over abundance - unnatural union
o Strong scent
o Total submission to father figure
 Stanza 2
o Flowers and bees
o Hint of electra complex
o Flowers seem to be readying themselves for conception
 Stanza 3
o Bees - subjects of beekeeper - father
o Eye - moment of self reflection
 Speaker's self conscious awareness of the metaphor
 Initial phase of plath's myth construction - stares at the metaphor she is
about to make and become
 o Queen bee - pinnacle to be, but still submissive to beekeeper/king
o Winter of your year
 God in decline
 Must live with the void of him
 Speaker loses part of her vitality
o Father has taken part of her identity - key to understanding herself
o Easter egg - spring, irony

The colossus

 Existance of speaker in absence of the god, waiting for his return

 God's return - wholeness of identity
 Elegiac, mournful tone
 Colossus
o Ancient greek reference
o Statue placed over entrance into rhodes
o Fell after an earthquake
o One of the tallest structures of its time
 Stanza 1
o Statue has already been ruined
o Resurrection can't occur
o Frustrating stasis is endured daily
o Craves meaning for communication
o Craves union
o She can't have what she wants
o Grimm resolution - humorous in a painful way
 Stanza 2
o Oracle - predicts future
o Father assumes godlike position, yet he can't fulfill it
o If father is in connection with the gods, communication still doesn't occur -
union is impossible
o Silt - sand/clay at the bottom of a river
 Stanza 3
o Lysol - disinfectant
o Ant in mourning -
 Total submission
 An ant attempting to reconstruct a statue - impossible
o Tumuli - ancient burial mounds
o No clarity
 Stanza 4
o Highlights constructiveness of the myth
o Oresteia - trilogy of plays of ancient greece
o Invokes mythic proportions
o O - calling out
o Roman forum - meeting place - bustling heart of rome - still stands among
ruins - opposite of stasis - ironic comparison but also dead earnest.
  Irony - if father is as pithy and historical as roman forum, one would
expect of him to be as central and prone to communication
 Earnest - he is historical and central to the understanding of herself
o Pithy - vigorously concise in expression - pith = core
o Evokes daily life
 Stanza 5
o Parts of shattered statue are spread all the way to the horizon - impossible, yet
she tries
o Not mere lightning that destroyed father figure - doomed destiny invoked -
this wasn't an accident. It was predestined. Fate
o Squat in ear - wants to communicate. Now it is simply shelter
o Cornucopia - wide variety. Doesn't present her other variety than spacial. It
can't hear
 Stanza 6
o Boredom.
o Emphasizing central position of father - as if father is making the sun rise
o Hours are married to shadow - marry the winter of your years
o Conclusion
 Keel - intended to balance a ship. Lengthened so that ship will scrape
the harbor
 Idiomatic expression - when my ship comes in - when things are going
well
 No longer expecting things to go better
 Denies possibility of resurrection or reunion

Daddy

 June 1962 - separates from ted hughes - next phase of poetry - ariel voice/final phase
 Composes at rapid rate
 New sense of selfhood - not dependent on male figure
 Shift to maternal - electra becomes more like mother
 Exorsism - expulsion of father figure
 Kill off male in order to achieve selfhood
 Stanza 1
o Daddy - shift in tone (from o father) - no longer distant. Must kill off too close
association of daddy, part of herself.
 No longer a statue, but a devil (vampire)
 Kills husband figure off as well
o Nursery rhyme style - reference to "woman who lived in a shoe" - trapped
woman
o Father had gangrene in his foot
 Stanza 2
o No pretence of innocence
o Has to kill notion of father inside of her
o Obvious reference to the colossus
o Enlargement -
 Stanza 3
o Nauset - north east of usa
o Figure is straddling the continent - much larger than previous
 o Grimm humour - self laceration
 Stanza 4
o Father was born in germany
o Speaker is systematically undoung her history and lineage
o Poetic distortions - father wasn't truly a nazi. Mother didn't really have gypsy
roots.
o Larger impersonal narrative - magnitute of situation
o Mythic enlargement - closer to what reality is than reality
 Stanza 5
o Craving for communication never occured
 Stanza 6
o Extreme distortion
o Speaker turns self into a jew in the hands of nazi opressors
o "Culturally insensitive to assume suffering of another race"
o Indicates drive towards enlargement. Not just a personal suffering
o Made impersonal to speaker
 Stanza 7
o Rejecting lineage of maternal line
 Stanza 8
o Communication is nonsense - pathetic
o Nonsense ideology
 Stanza 9
o Iconic abstraction - not even a real being, just a representation of evil that she
is rejected to
o Every woman adores a fascist - element of complicity
o Shocks reader - willfull enslavement
 Stanza 10
o Incarnation of father as a devil that must be purged
 Stanza 11 - 14
o Father figure is doubled as husband figure
o Seeks magical cycle - distorts facts (10 and 20 instead of 8 and 21)
o Meinkamof look - "my struggle" - hitler's autobiography.
o Man in black - refers to hughes
 Stanza 15
o Instruments of torture
 Stanza 16
o Horrid marriage - 7 years
 Stanza 17
o Public realm invoked - enlargement
o Many people revolted by father figure
o Final rejection/exorsism - "you bastard im through"
o Rejects patriarchal domination inside of her

First phase - god in decline, mourning goddess

Second phase - rejection
Third phase - selfhood itself becomes the problem - attempts to dissolve selfhood. Seeks
mystical union with the world. (Edge)
Ariel

 Written on thirtieth birthday

 "Powerful expression of ecstatic unity"
 Vague conception - partly mystical
 Written at 4 am
 Speaker undergoes changes in mystical imaginary sense
 Title
o Hebrew for lion/altar of god
o Name of a horse plath was learning to ride at this time
o Shakespeare's aries spirit - confined spirit who is crucially set free
o Biblical illusion to book of isiah.
 Talk of jerusalem being destroyed. - becomes altar on which citizens
are destroyed
 Speaker sacrifices self on a horse
 Stanza 1
o New importance of colours
o Immediate change - blue horizon
 Stanza 4
o Not racial - but latin reference
o Details of mythic heroins life need to be transcended
 Stanza 6
o Elements of self start to unravel
o A force from outside
 Stanza 7
o Godiva - rode naked on a horse to persuade husband to lower taxes
o Identifying with mythic heroin - nakedness of truth
o Speaks of her unraveling, defiance,
o White - purity - new moon
 Stanza 8
o Merges with landscape
o Last attempt of mundane life to call her back
o Child's cry can't reach her - she is beyond
 Stanza 10
o I - reference to eye (sun)
o Insistence on transformation
o Yearning for transformation into something more fundamental
 Stanza 11
o Red - rebirth - closing off of narrative
o Cauldron of morning