|  |
◊Ezra Pound◊
◊A Girl
by: Ezra Pound ◊
The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast-
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are, |
You are violets with wind above them.
A child - so high - you are,
And all this is folly to the world.
◊About Ezra Pound◊
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (October 30, 1885 – November 1, 1972) was an American expatriate, poet, musician, and critic who, along with T. S. Eliot, was a major figure of the Modernist movement in early 20th century poetry. He was the driving force behind several Modernist movements, notably Imagism and Vorticism. The critic Hugh Kenner said on meeting Pound: "I suddenly knew that I was in the presence of the center of modernism."
Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, United States to Homer Loomis and Isabel Weston Pound. He studied for two years at the University of Pennsylvania and later received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1905. During studies at Penn, he met and befriended William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to whom he was engaged for a time. H.D. also became involved with a woman named Frances Gregg around this time. Shortly afterwards, H.D. and Gregg, along with Gregg's mother, went to Europe.
Afterward, Pound taught at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana for less than a year, and left as the result of a minor scandal. In 1908 he traveled to Europe, settling in London after spending several months in Venice.
◊The London Revolution◊
The cover of the 1915 wartime number of the Vorticist magazine BLAST.Pound's early poetry was inspired by his reading of the pre-Raphaelites and other 19th century poets and medieval Romance literature, as well as much neo-Romantic and occult/mystical philosophy. When he moved to London, under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme, he began to cast off overtly archaic poetic language and forms in an attempt to remake himself as a poet. He believed W. B. Yeats was the greatest living poet, and befriended him in England, eventually being employed as the Irish poet's secretary. He was also interested in Yeats's occult beliefs. During the war, Pound and Yeats lived together at Stone Cottage in Sussex, England, studying Japanese, especially Noh plays. They paid particular attention to the works of Ernest Fenollosa, an American professor in Japan, whose work on Chinese characters Pound developed into what he called the Ideogrammic Method. In 1914, Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, an artist, and the daughter of Olivia Shakespear, a novelist and former lover of W.B. Yeats.
In the years before the First World War, Pound was largely responsible for the appearance of Imagism, and contributed the name to the movement known as Vorticism, which was led by Wyndham Lewis. These two movements, which helped bring to notice the work of poets and artists like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Richard Aldington, Marianne Moore, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Frost, Rebecca West and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, can be seen as central events in the birth of English-language modernism. Pound also edited his friend Eliot's The Waste Land, the poem that was to force the new poetic sensibility into public attention.
In 1915, Pound published Cathay, a small volume of poems that Pound described as “For the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku [Li Po], from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga."[1]. The volume includes works such as The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter and A Ballad of the Mulberry Road. Unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, who tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound offered readers free verse translations celebrated for their ease of diction and conversationality. Many critics consider the poems in Cathay to be the most successful realization of Pound's Imagist poetics. Whether or not the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy. Neither Pound nor Fenollosa spoke or read Chinese proficiently, and Pound has been criticized for omitting or adding sections to his poems which have no basis in the original texts. Many critics argue, however, that the fidelity of Cathay to the original Chinese is beside the point. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter entitled "The Invention of China," contends that Cathay should be read primarily as a book about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem". These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West.
The war shattered Pound's belief in modern western civilization and he abandoned London soon after, but not before he published Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). If these poems together form a farewell to Pound's London career, The Cantos, which he began in 1915, pointed his way forward.
◊Paris◊
In 1920, Pound moved to Paris where he moved among a circle of artists, musicians and writers who were revolutionising the whole world of modern art. He was friends with notable figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Fernand Leger and others of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He continued working on The Cantos, writing the bulk of the "Malatesta Sequence" which introduced one of the major personas of the poem. The poem increasingly reflected his preoccupations with politics and economics. During this time, he also wrote critical prose, translations and composed two complete operas (with help from George Antheil) and several pieces for solo violin. In 1922 he met and became involved with Olga Rudge, a violinist. Together with Dorothy Shakespear, they formed an uneasy ménage à trois which was to last until the end of the poet's life.
◊Italy◊
Ezra Pound's annotations on his copy of James Legge's translation of the Book of Poetry (Shih Ching), in the Sacred Books of the East.On 10 October 1924, Pound left Paris permanently and moved to Rapallo, Italy. He and Dorothy stayed there briefly, moving on to Sicily, and then returning to settle in Rapallo in January 1925. In Italy he continued to be a creative catalyst. The young sculptor Heinz Henghes came to see Pound, arriving penniless. He was given lodging and marble to carve, and quickly learned to work in stone. The poet James Laughlin was also inspired at this time to start the publishing company New Directions which would become a vehicle for many new authors.
At this time Pound also organized an annual series of concerts in Rapallo where a wide range of classical and contemporary music was performed. In particular this musical activity contributed to the 20th century revival of interest in Vivaldi, who had been neglected since his death.
In Italy Pound became an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, and anti-Semitic sentiments begin to appear in his writings. He made his first trip back home for many years in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and considered moving back permanently, but in the end he chose to return to Italy.
Aside from his political sympathy with the Mussolini regime, Pound had personal reasons for staying. His elderly parents had retired to Italy to be with him, and were in poor health and would have difficulty making the trip back to America even under peacetime conditions. He also had an Italian-born daughter by his mistress Olga Rudge: Mary (or Maria) Rudge was a young woman in her late teens who had lived in Italy her whole life and who might have had difficulty relocating to America (even though she had American as well as Italian citizenship.)
Pound remained in Italy after the outbreak of the Second World War, which began more than two years before his native United States formally entered the war in December 1941. He became a leading Axis propagandist. He also continued to be involved in scholarly publishing, and he wrote many newspaper pieces. He disapproved of American involvement in the war and tried to use his political contacts in Washington D.C. to prevent it. He spoke on Italian radio and gave a series of talks on cultural matters. Inevitably, he touched on political matters, and his opposition to the war and his anti-Semitism were apparent on occasions. Here is a sample from one of his broadcasts: "The big Jew is so bound up with this Leihkapital that no one is able to unscramble that omelet. It would be better for you to retire to Darbyshire and defy New Jerusalem, better for you to retire to Gloucester and find one spot that is England than to go on fighting for Jewry and ignoring the process....You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew....And the big Jew has rotted EVERY nation he has wormed into" (March 15, 1942).
It is not clear if anyone in the United States ever actually heard his radio broadcasts, since Italian radio's shortwave transmitters were weak and unreliable. It is clear, however, that his writings for Italian newspapers (as well as a number of books and pamphlets) did have some influence in Italy.
In July 1943, the southern half of Italy was overrun by Allied forces. At the Allies' behest, King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Mussolini as premier of the Kingdom of Italy. Mussolini escaped to the north, where he declared himself the President of the new Salo Republic. Pound played a significant role in cultural and propaganda activities in the new republic, which lasted till the spring of 1945.
On May 2, 1945, he was arrested by Italian partisans, and taken (according to Hugh Kenner) "to their HQ in Chiavari, where he was soon released as possessing no interest." The next day, he turned himself in to U.S. forces. He was incarcerated in a United States Army detention camp outside Pisa, spending twenty-five days in an open cage before being given a tent. Here he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He also drafted the Pisan Cantos in the camp. This section of the work in progress marks a shift in Pound's work, being a meditation on his own and Europe's ruin and on his place in the natural world. The Pisan Cantos won the first Bollingen Prize from the Library of Congress in 1948.
◊St. Elizabeths◊
After the war, Pound was brought back to the United States to face charges of treason. The charges covered only his activities during the time when the Kingdom of Italy was officially at war with the United States, i.e., the time before the Allies captured Rome and Mussolini fled to the North. Pound was not prosecuted for his activities on behalf of Mussolini's Saló Republic (evidently because the Republic's existence was never formally recognized by the United States). He was found unfit to face trial because of insanity and sent to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he remained for 12 years from 1946 to 1958. His insanity plea is still a matter of some controversy, since in retrospect his activities and his writings during the war years do not appear to be those of a clinically insane person. The insanity plea was part of a plea bargain designed to save his life, since treason is potentially a capital offense. As it turned out, there were a number of other American Axis collaborators who stood trial after the war without being sentenced to death. Pound's controversial insanity plea is mirrored by the fate of Norwegian author and collaborator Knut Hamsun, who was similarly dubbed insane by embarassed authorities despite evidence (in the form of subsequent published material) to the contrary.
Following his release, Pound was asked his opinions on his home country. He famously quipped: "America is a lunatic asylum." Subsequently he returned to Italy, where he remained until his death in 1972. Pound was conceited and flamboyant, not to say obsessive, which in psychiatric terms became "grandiosity of ideas and beliefs."
By contrast, E. Fuller Torrey believed that Mussolini's propagandist was coddled by Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths. According to Torrey, Overholser admired Pound's poetry and allowed him to live in a private room at the hospital, where he wrote three books, received visits from literary celebrities and enjoyed conjugal relations with his wife and several mistresses. However, the reliability of Torrey’s allegations has been questioned. Other scholars have presented Overholser as behaving solely in a humane way to his famous patient, without allowing him special privileges. At St. Elizabeths, Pound was surrounded by poets and other admirers and continued working on The Cantos as well as translating the Confucian classics.
One of Pound's most frequent visitors was the then-chairman of the States' Rights Democratic Party, with whom Pound used to discuss strategy and tactics on how best to rally public support for the preservation of racial segregation in the American South.
Pound was also befriended there by Hugh Kenner, whose The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) was highly influential in causing a re-assessment of Pound's poetry. Other scholars began to edit the Pound Newsletter, which eventually led to the publication of the first guide to The Cantos, Annotated Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (1957). Pound was most happy in his relations with fellow-poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, who recorded her response to Pound’s tragic situation in the poem "Visits to St. Elizabeths," and Robert Lowell, who visited and corresponded extensively with Pound. Another visitor who is believed to have inspired the love-poetry in Cantos XC-XCV was the artist Sheri Martinelli. Both William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukosfsky were among Pound's visitors, as was Guy Davenport, who subsequently wrote his Harvard dissertation on Pound's poetry (published as Cities on Hills in 1983). Pound was finally released after a concerted campaign by many of his fellow poets and artists, particularly Robert Frost and Archibald MacLeish. He was still considered incurably insane, but not dangerous to others.
◊Return to Italy and Death◊
Grave of Pound in the San Michele cemetery, VeniceOn his release, Pound returned to Italy where he continued writing, but his old certainties had deserted him. Although he continued working on The Cantos, he seemed to view them as an artistic failure. Allen Ginsberg, in an interview with Michael Reck, stated that Pound seemed to regret many of his past actions, and that he regretted that his work was tainted with "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism", although contemporaneous letters published in recent years indicate that he was still unrepentently anti-Semitic. Pound died in Venice in 1972.
◊Musical Quality of Pound's Poetry◊
Pound's The Cantos, one of the 20th century's most important literary works, is a poem that contains music and bears a title that could be translated as The Songs --though it never is. Pound's ear was tuned to the motz el sons of troubadour poetry where, as musicologist John Stevens has noted, "melody and poem existed in a state of the closest symbiosis, obeying the same laws and striving in their different media for the same sound-ideal - armonia."
In his essays, Pound wrote of rhythm as "the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit." He challenged young poets to train their ear with translation work to learn how the choice of words and the movement of the words combined. But having translated texts from ten different languages into English, Pound found that translation did not always serve the poetry: "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn strophe writing are Catullus and Francois Villon. I personally have been reduced to setting them to music as I cannot translate them." While he habitually wrote out verse rhythms as musical lines, Pound did not set his own poetry to music.
In 1919, when he was 34, Pound began charting his path as a novice composer, writing privately that he intended a revolt against the impressionistic music of Debussy. An autodidact, Pound described his working method as "improving a system by refraining from obedience to all its present 'laws'..." With only a few formal lessons in music composition, Pound produced a small body of work, including a setting of Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno," for violin. His most important output is the pair of operas: Le Testament, a setting of Francois Villon's long poem of that name, written in 1461; and Cavalcanti, a setting of 11 poems by Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250-1300). Pound began composing the Villon with the help of Agnes Bedford, London pianist and vocal coach. Though the work is notated in Bedford's hand, Pound scholar Robert Hughes has been able to determine that Pound was artistically responsible for the work's overall dramatic and acoustic design.
During the fecund Paris years of 1921-1924, Pound formed close friendships with the American pianist and composer George Antheil, and Antheil's touring partner, the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Pound championed Antheil's music and asked his help in devising a system of micro-rhythms that would more accurately render the vitalistic speech rhythms of Villon's Old French for Le Testament. The resulting collaboration of 1923 used irregular meters that were considerably more elaborate than Stravinsky's benchmarks of the period, Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) and L'Histoire du Soldat (1918). For example, "Heaulmiere," one of the opera's key arias, at a tempo of quarter note = M.M. 88, moves from 2/8 to 25/32 to 3/8 to 2/4 meter (bars 25-28), creating for the performers ferocious difficulties in hearing the current bar of music and anticipating the upcoming bar. Rudge performed in the 1924 and 1926 Paris preview concerts of Le Testament, but insisted to Pound that the meter was impractical.
In Le Testament there is no predictability of manner; no comfort zone for singer or listener; no rests or breath marks. Though Pound stays within the hexatonic scale to evoke the feel of troubadour melodies, modern invention runs throughout, from the stream of unrelenting dissonance in the mother's prayer to the grand shape of the work's aesthetic arc over a period of almost an hour. The rhythm carries the emotion. The music admits the corporeal rhythms (the score calls for human bones to be used in the percussion part); scratches, hiccoughs, and counter-rhythms lurch against each other--an offense to courtly etiquette. With "melody against ground tone and forced against another melody," as Pound puts it, the work spawns a polyphony in polyrhythms that ignores traditional laws of harmony. It was a test of Pound's ideal of an "absolute" and "uncounterfeitable" rhythm conducted in the laboratory of someone obsessed with the relationship between words and music.
After hearing a concert performance of Le Testament in 1926, Virgil Thomson praised Pound's accomplishment. "The music was not quite a musician's music," he wrote, "though it may well be the finest poet's music since Thomas Campion. . . . Its sound has remained in my memory."
Robert Hughes has remarked that where Le Testament explores a Webernesque pointillistic orchestration and derives its vitality from complex rhythms, Cavalcanti (1931) thrives on extensions of melody. Based on the lyric love poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, the opera's numbers are characterized by a challenging bel canto, into which Pound incorporates a number of tongue-in-cheek references to Verdi and a musical motive that gestures to Stravinsky's neo-classicism. By this time the relationship with Antheil had considerably cooled, and Pound, in his gradual acquisition of technical self-sufficiency, was free to emulate certain aspects of Stravinsky. Cavalcanti demands attention to its varying cadences, to a recurring leitmotif, and to a symbolic use of octaves. The play of octaves creates a surrealist straining against the limits of established compositional laws, of history and fate, of physiology, of reason, and especially against the limits of a love born of desire. The audience is asked to strain to hear a political cipher hidden within the music.
Pound's statement, "Rhythm is a FORM cut into TIME," distinguishes his 20th century medievalism from Antheil's SPACE/TIME theory of modern music, which sought pure abstraction. Antheil's system of time organization is inherently biased for complex, asymmetric, and fast tempi; it thrives on innovation and surprise. Pound's more open system allows for any sequence of pitches; it can accommodate older styles of music with their symmetry, repetition, and more uniform tempi, as well as newer methods, such as the asymmetrical micro-metrical divisions of rhythm created for Le Testament.
Pound's iconoclastic music can be compared to that of his contemporary, Charles Ives. Both subjected melody to sophisticated techniques of juxtaposition and layering, Pound shaping melody with literary textures and Ives with harmonic and contrapuntal textures. Each experimented with the combination of different genres placed into a single complex work. Ives selected from among hymns, folk tunes, ballads and minstrelsy, as well as instrumental pieces. Pound selected from a vocal gamut of plainchant, homophony, troubadour melodies, bel canto and nineteenth century opera clichés, as well as 20th-century polyrhythms and cabaret style singing.
Pound's music theories are reactionary and revolutionary, irascible and philosophic. His reach passes through the physical science of sound to offer many epiphanies.
◊Importance◊
Because of his political views, especially his support of Mussolini and his anti-Semitism, Pound attracted much criticism throughout the second half of the twentieth century. As historical revisionist models of criticism wane, however, it seems as though Pound scholars are becoming interested in his words and not his views. It is almost impossible to ignore the vital role he played in the modernist revolution in 20th century literature in English. Pound's perceived importance has varied over the years. The location of Pound -- as opposed to other writers such as T.S. Eliot -- at the center of the Anglo-American Modernist tradition was famously asserted by the critic Hugh Kenner, most fully in his account of the Modernist movement titled The Pound Era. The critic Marjorie Perloff has also insisted upon the centrality of Pound to numerous traditions of "experimental" poetry in the 20th century.
As a poet, Pound was one of the first to successfully employ free verse in extended compositions. His Imagist poems influenced, among others, the Objectivists. The Cantos and many of Pound's shorter poems were a touchstone for Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets; Ginsberg made an intense study of Pound's use of parataxis which had a major influence on his poetry. Almost every 'experimental' poet in English since the early 20th century has been considered by some to be in his debt.
As critic, editor and promoter, Pound helped the careers of Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting, George Oppen, Charles Olson and other modernist writers too numerous to mention as well as neglected earlier writers like Walter Savage Landor and Gavin Douglas.
Immediately before the first world war Pound became interested in art when he was associated with the Vorticists (Pound coined the word). Pound did much to publicize the movement and was instrumental in bringing it to the attention of the wider public (he was particularly important in the artistic careers of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis).
As translator, although his mastery of languages is open to question, Pound did much to introduce Provençal and Chinese poetry to English speaking audiences. For example, insofar as major poets such as Cavalcanti and Du Fu, are known to the English speaking world, it is mainly because of Pound. He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the West to classical Japanese poetry and drama (e.g. the Noh). He also translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics and helped keep these alive for poets at a time when classical education and knowledge of anglo-saxon was in decline.
In the early 1920s in Paris, Pound became interested in music, and was probably the first serious writer in the 20th century to praise the work of the long-neglected Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi and to promote early music generally. He also helped the early career of George Antheil, and collaborated with him on various projects.
The secret to Pound's seemingly bizarre theories and political commitments perhaps lie in his occult and mystical interests, which biographers have only recently begun to document. 'The Birth of Modernism' by Leon Surette is perhaps the best introduction to this aspect of Pound's thought.
◊Selected works◊
Ezra Pound1908 A Lume Spento, poems.
1908 A Quinzaine for This Yule, poems.
1909 Personae, poems.
1909 Exultations, poems.
1910 Provenca, poems.
1910 The Spirit of Romance, essays.
1911 Canzoni, poems.
1912 Ripostes of Ezra Pound, poems.
1912 Sonnets and ballate of Guido Cavalcanti, translations.
1915 Cathay, poems / translations.
1916 Certain noble plays of Japan: from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa, chosen and finished by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats.
1916 "Noh", or, Accomplishment: a study of the classical stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound.
1916 The Lake Isle, poem.
1917 Lustra of Ezra Pound, poems.
1917 Twelve Dialogues of Fontenelle, translations.
1918 Quia Pauper Amavi, poems.
1918 Pavannes and Divisions, essays.
1919 The Fourth Canto, poems.
1920 Umbra, poems and translations.
1920 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, poems.
1921 Poems, 1918-1921, poems.
1922 The Natural Philosophy of Love, by Rémy de Gourmont, translations.
1923 Indiscretions, essays.
1923 Le Testament, one-act opera.
1924 Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, essays.
1925 A Draft of XVI Cantos, poems.
1927 Exile, poems
1928 A Draft of the Cantos 17-27, poems.
1928 Ta hio, the great learning, newly rendered into the American language, translation.
1930 Imaginary Letters, essays.
1931 How to Read, essays.
1933 A Draft of XXX Cantos, poems.
1933 ABC of Economics, essays.
1933 Cavalcanti, three-act opera.
1934 Homage to Sextus Propertius, poems.
1934 Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI, poems.
1934 ABC of Reading, essays.
1935 Make It New, essays.
1936 Chinese written character as a medium for poetry, by Ernest Fenollosa, edited and with a foreword and notes by Ezra Pound.
1936 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, essays.
1937 The Fifth Decade of Cantos, poems.
1937 Polite Essays, essays.
1937 Digest of the Analects, by Confucius, translation.
1938 Culture, essays.
1939 What Is Money For?, essays.
1940 Cantos LII-LXXI, poems.
1944 L'America, Roosevelt e le Cause della Guerra Presente, essays.
1944 Introduzione alla Natura Economica degli S.U.A., prose.
1947 Confucius: the Unwobbling pivot & the Great digest, translation.
1948 The Pisan Cantos, poems.
1950 Seventy Cantos, poems.
1951 Confucian analects, translated by Ezra Pound.
1956 Section Rock-Drill, 85-95 de los Cantares, poems.
1956 Women of Trachis, by Sophocles, translation.
1959 Thrones: 96-109 de los Cantares, poems.
1968 Drafts and Fragments: Cantos CX-CXVII, poems.
1997 Ezra Pound and Music, essays.
2002 Canti postumi, poems
2003 Ego scriptor cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound, operas/music.
◊Poems by Ezra Pound◊
A collection of Poems by Ezra Pound
Contributed By : Kat (Razor Heretic) |
|  |
◊Sylvia Plath◊
◊Ennui
by: Sylvia Plath ◊
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.
The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager, |
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
◊About Sylvia Plath◊
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Most famous as a poet, Plath is also known for The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel detailing her struggle with clinical depression, specifically bipolar disorder. Plath and Anne Sexton are credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry that Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass initiated. Since her suicide, Sylvia Plath has risen to iconic status. While married to Ted Hughes, her husband wrote a poem 'Wind', this poem was seen to have shown the storminess of their relationship and how distant they were with one another. Sylvia Plath's suicide was said to have been caused by the fact that Ted Hughes had separated from her in the prior year.
Sylvia started her life in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. During her early childhood, Sylvia's father Otto suffered from a lengthy illness. Otto, certain he had cancer, did not seek treatment initially. When he finally did see a doctor, a case of diabetes was diagnosed but by that time his illness was advanced. His end was fraught with suffering which included the amputation of a leg. Reference to the leg is made in "Daddy" Otto died just days past Sylvia's 8th birthday.
Sylvia was an excellent student and in 1950 she was accepted into Smith College on a scholarship. She was at the top of her class and should logically have been very happy. That was not the case. She lived in fear that it would be found out that she wasn't the perfectly happy person she tried to project. In 1952 she won the first prize of $500 from Mademoiselle magazine for her short story "Sunday at the Minton’s". The following June 1953, Sylvia was a guest editor at the Mademoiselle New York offices, which she later wrote about in The Bell Jar. She came home from New York in a state of exhaustion and depression. She was counting on being accepted into Frank O'Connor's creative writing course at Harvard and when she wasn't, she went into a state of withdrawal. She was distraught, scared inside, unable to sleep or function, but still determined to show the world a brave face. On August 24th, unable to carry on any longer, she attempted suicide. For the next months she was institutionalised at Maclean Hospital and was treated with insulin therapy and shock treatments. During this period of hospitalisation, Sylvia unknowingly was collecting material for her novel The Bell Jar and short story "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams".
In October 1955, Sylvia attended Newnham College at Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship. After a series of go nowhere relationships and numerous blind dates, Sylvia met Ted Hughes at a St. Botolph's party on February 25, 1956. They were married on a rainy day in London on June 16th of the same year and honeymooned in Benidorm, Spain. Ted Hughes describes the details of their wedding beautifully in his poem "A Pink Wool Knitted Dress" in Birthday Letters.
After the conclusion of her studies at Cambridge in the spring of 1957, Sylvia was asked to teach English at Smith College, where she had taken her undergraduate studies. Sylvia returned to America, bringing her husband with her. Her mother, Aurelia Plath, made them a present of a vacation on Cape Cod. Sylvia was excited at the prospect of teaching English, an obvious favorite subject area. She wasn't long on the faculty when she felt overwhelmed. She chastised herself for presuming that she could teach. The preparatory work was exhausting and she perceived the faculty's coldness to her. She had dreamed of giving marvellous lectures and leisurely writing her book. As was her lot, she must be brilliant and make it look as "easy as pie". She was sick frequently and most unhappy. When the year was over, she did not return. The College was very satisfied with Sylvia's performance, but Sylvia felt she had failed and she wouldn't go back for another year. Already Sylvia was beginning to have doubts about Ted's love for her. She needed constantly to be reassured. Sylvia took a less taxing clerical position as a receptionist in the psychiatric clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and continued with her writing. In early December of 1958 she began to secretly see Ruth Boucher, her therapist from McLean, where she had been hospitalized after her earlier suicide attempt in the summer of 1953. She also attended an evening poetry class, which was given by Robert Lowell, whose confessional style influenced Sylvia’s poetry.
In December 1959 Sylvia and Ted returned to England. Sylvia was pregnant and due to give birth in the spring of 1960. On April 1st, Frieda Rebecca was born. During her pregnancy, on February 10th, Sylvia signed a contract with William Heinemann Ltd. to publish The Colossus, which was to come out in October 1960. Outwardly Sylvia showed amazing energy. She scoured and scrubbed their London flat, wanting a pretty home for herself, her husband and their yet to be born baby. Inwardly she felt exhausted and barely able to carry on, but unwilling to let the world know and her circumstances pressed in on her. She wanted everything, and the writing was her outlet and her curse. It was both her salvation and her undoing.
The following February 1961 a miscarriage left Sylvia feeling depressed. She wrote of it in a poem "Parliament Hill Fields".
In August 1961 the Hughes family moved to a Devon farm and Sylvia was isolated. Ted had become more removed from her. A son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17th, 1962. In July, Sylvia discovered Ted's affair with Assia Wevill. Sylvia and Ted separated in September. In the following month Sylvia wrote at least 26 of the Ariel poems.
In December 1962, Sylvia took the children with her to London and moved into an apartment at 23 Fitzroy Road, which was the former home of poet William Butler Yeats. The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas in January 1963. On February 11, 1963 Sylvia gave up her life.
Although Sylvia Plath's life was brief in conventional terms, her life was rich in experiences. She received accolades in the form of prizes, awards, and scholarships. She had literary successes, although none so great as those that were endowed on her post-humorously. In 1982 she received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her Collected Poems.
Sylvia Plath was many things to many people; she was daughter, sister, student and teacher, wife and mother, and finally a writer. In death, she continues to influence people for more than her literary excellence.
She was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to succeed and a burning desire to write. Sylvia had other needs that clashed with her literary ambitions. She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she could belong and be loved for herself. She wanted a good husband and children. In school and outside of it, she was a high achiever never being able to quite reach the very high expectations she set for herself. No one was able to drive Sylvia more than herself. She knew self-doubt and depression. Yet to the world she presented a carefree, it's so easy attitude. In reality she worked, pushing herself relentlessly, whether in her studies, her teaching, in her relationships or her writing. Only those nearest to her knew how troubled Sylvia's life was.
♠Life♠
Plath was born in Boston to a German father and an Austrian-American mother. She showed early promise, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her father, Otto, a college professor and noted authority on the subject of bees, died of an embolism following surgery (complications from undiagnosed diabetes) on November 5, 1940. She was eight years old at the time, and, upon his death, she was quoted to have said "I'll never speak to God again." The pain felt as a young girl was carried with her throughout her life, indicated through her continual use of bees in her poetry as allusions to her father's life. Plath never fully recovered from the loss of her father. She continued to try to publish poems, and in August of 1950, her first short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared in Seventeen magazine.
A self-portrait circa 1951.Sylvia suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life. She had entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but in the summer of 1953, after her return from a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York, she experienced a severe episode of depression and was treated with a regimen of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and, subsequently, at the beginning of her junior year, on August 24, 1953, she made the first of her suicide attempts. She was committed to a mental institution (McLean Hospital), and seemed to make an acceptable recovery, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955, the same year she won the prestigious Glascock Prize competition for her poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea." She later depicted her breakdown in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.
Plath earned a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where she continued writing poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge she met English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956 (Bloomsday) with Plath's mother in attendance. Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the United States. Plath taught at Smith. They then moved to Boston where Plath sat in on seminars with Robert Lowell. This course was to have a profound influence on her work. Plath also met poet Anne Sexton during these seminars and became friends with her. At this time Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and remained a lifelong friend. On discovering that Plath was pregnant, they moved back to the United Kingdom. Frieda Hughes was born on April 1, 1960.
She and Hughes lived in London for a while before settling in Court Green, North Tawton, a small market town in Mid Devonshire. She published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, in the United Kingdom in 1960. In February 1961, she suffered a miscarriage. A number of poems refer to this event. On January 17, 1962, after her determination to have more children finally paid off, she gave birth to a son, Nicholas Farrar in their home in Devon. Her marriage met with difficulties and they were separated less than two years after the birth of their first child, Frieda. Their separation was partly due to her mental illness, which was exacerbated by the affair that Hughes had with a fellow poet's wife, Assia Wevill. The nature of her illness remains the subject of much speculation. Theories range from bipolar disorder (manic-depressive syndrome) to schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Plath returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas. She rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill (near Regent's Park), in a house where W. B. Yeats once lived; Plath was extremely pleased with this and considered it a good omen. However, the winter of 1962/1963 was very harsh. Finding herself unable to cope, she rang her friend Jillian Becker and spent the last weekend of her life at the Becker household. The Becker home was warm and comfortable and equipped for children, the Beckers having three girls, the youngest, Madeleine, a baby of about Nick's age. She appears to have been happy that weekend, and resolved to return home on the Sunday. On February 11, 1963, Plath gassed herself in her kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty. The new nanny arrived but couldn't rouse Plath's neighbor in the flat below, as he was under the effect of the gas. Plath's children were found in good health, if a bit chilled--she had taken the precautions of opening the windows in the other rooms and sealing the kitchen door crack with dish towels. It is thought that news of Assia's pregnancy with Ted's child contributed to her motivation for suicide. Assia terminated the pregnancy soon after Sylvia's death.[1]
Plath is buried in the churchyard at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Rumours of her poverty in the last year of her life have been disputed by later books, particularly Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame. The neutrality of this biography is disputed, and it remains difficult to obtain an objective account of the relationship between Plath and Hughes.
♠Works♠
Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. This is controversial, as it is uncertain whether or not Plath had begun divorce proceedings before her death: if she had, Hughes' inheritance of the Plath estate would have been disputed. In letters to Aurelia Plath and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she was applying for a divorce. However, Hughes has said in a letter to "The Guardian" that Plath did not seriously consider divorce, and claims they were talking about a future together right up until her death.
Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary at the age of 11 and kept journals until her suicide in February 1963. Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he destroyed Plath's last journal, which contains entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as "The Journals of Sylvia Plath," edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired all of Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2003 (40 years after Plath's death). During his last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto Freida and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her edits in December 1999 and in 2000 Anchor Books published "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath." According to the back cover, roughly two-thirds of the "Unabridged Journals" is newly unreleased material. The publication was hailed as a "genuine literary event" by Joyce Carol Oates. In 2006, Anna Journey, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet titled "Ennui." The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird the online journal.
In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (for "The Collected Poems").
Many critics accused Hughes of attempting to control the publications for his own ends, although he denied this. Examples usually cited are his censoring of parts of her Journals, and his editing of "Ariel." This editing involved removing several poems, and rearranging the order in which the works appeared. Some critics have argued this prevented what was intended to be a more uplifting beginning and ending of "Ariel," and that the poems removed were the ones most readily identified as being about Hughes. He also cut a deal with Plath's mother Aurelia when she tried to block publication of her daughter's more controversial works in the United States. In his last collection, "Birthday Letters," Hughes broke his silence about Plath. The cover artwork was done by Frieda.
While critics initially responded favorably to Plath's first book, "The Colossus," it has also been described as conventional and lacking the drama of her later works. The extent of Hughes' influence has been a topic of great debate. Plath's poems are written as if in her own voice, and the similarities between the two poets' works are slight.
The poems in "Ariel" mark a departure from her earlier work into a more confessional area of poetry. It is possible Lowell's poetry--which was often labeled "confessional"--played a part in this shift. The impact of "Ariel" was dramatic, with its frank descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as "Daddy." Plath has also been heavily criticized for her controversial allusions to The Holocaust, and is known for her shocking use of metaphor. Plath's work has been associated with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets. Despite criticism and biographies published after her death, the debate about Plath's work resembles a struggle between readers who side with her and readers who side with Hughes. An indication of the level of bitterness that some people have directed at Hughes can be seen in the history of people chiseling the word "Hughes" off her gravestone. Her headstone has subsequently been rendered more 'tamper proof.'
♠Bibliography♠
 |
♣Poetry♣
The Collected Poems (1981)
A Better Resurrection
A Birthday Present
A Lesson In Vengeance
A Life
Aftermath
Among The Narcissi
An Appearance
Apprehensions
April |
Ariel
Balloons
Berck-Plage
Black Rook In Rainy Weather
Blackberrying
Bucolics
By Candlelight
Child
Contusion
Conversation Among The Ruins
Crossing The Water
Cut
Daddy
Death & Co.
Dialogue Between Ghost And Priest
Edge
Edge
Electra On Azalea Path
Elm
Ennui
Face Lift
Faun
Fever 103°
Fiesta Melons
Frog Autumn
Full Fathom Five
Getting There
Gigolo
Goatsucker
Goatsucker
I Am Vertical
In Plaster
Insomniac
Jilted
Kindness
Lady Lazarus
Landowners
Last Words
Leaving Early
Lesbos
Letter In November
Lorelei
Love Is A Parallax
Love Letter
Lyonnesse
Mad Girl's Love Song
Mary's Song
Medusa
Metaphors
Metaphors
Mirror
Monologue At 3 AM
Morning Song
Mushrooms
Mystic
Never Try To Trick Me With A Kiss
Nick And The Candlestick
Night Shift
On Looking Into The Eyes Of A Demon Lover
Paralytic
Perseus
Pheasant
Poems, Potatoes
Polly's Tree
Poppies In July
Poppies In October
Prospect
Purdah
Pursuit
Resolve
Sculptor
Sheep In Fog
Sleep In The Mojave Desert
Snakecharmer
Southern Sunrise
Sow
Spinster
Stillborn
Stings
Strumpet Song
Tale Of A Tub
The Applicant
The Arrival Of The Bee Box
The Bee Meeting
The Bull Of Bendylaw
The Colossus
The Couriers
The Dead
The Disquieting Muses
The Eye-Mote
The Moon And The Yew Tree
The Munich Mannequins
The Night Dances
The Other
The Other Two
The Queen's Complaint
The Rival
The Sleepers
The Swarm
The Thin People
The Times Are Tidy
Three Women
Totem
Tulips
Two Campers In Cloud Country
Two Sisters Of Persephone
Two Views Of A Cadaver Room
Vanity Fair
Virgin In A Tree
Winter Landscape, With Rooks
Winter Trees
Wintering
Words
Wuthering Heights
Years
You're
♠Prose♠
The Bell Jar (1963) under the pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas'
Letters Home (1975) to and edited by her mother
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977) (the UK edition contains two stories the US edition does not)
The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
The Magic Mirror (1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)
Children's♠
The Bed Book (1976)
The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)
A number of "limited edition" works were published by specialist publishers, often with very small print runs.
♠Biography♠
Sylvia Plath (2004, Chelsea House, Great Writers Series) by Peter K. Steinberg | ISBN 0-7910-7843-4
Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage by Diane Middlebrook, Viking Adult 2003 ISBN 0-670-03187-9
♠Sylvia Remembered♠
♠Books♠
When asked about her writing habits, Beatrice Lao quoted from her poem: 'Luscious lips of a Prada bag pout, Out springs a Plath poem, Recreating the sixties'. The oriental poetess carries drafts of her own poems in her bag.
In Kiss The Girls by James Patterson, chapter 46 contains this reference, as narrated by central character, Alex Cross. "I remembered a sad, powerful Sylvia Plath poem called "Tulips". It was about Plath's decidedly unsentimental reaction to flowers sent to her hospital room after a suicide attempt."
♠Films♠
In the film "Annie Hall," Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer observes a copy of "Ariel" and remarks, "Syliva Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality ." (The word "poetess" has become uncommon in recent years: it is surprising that Allen used it, because he knew many people who would have deprecated it; perhaps, Allen is satirizing himself or his character. In the Nineteenth Century, women who wrote poetry were called "poetesses; women who did sculpture were called "sculptresses." Now (in 2006), women who write poetry are called "poets," just as women who write novels are called "novelists."
In the movie Fight Club, Sylvia Plath is mentioned by the character performed by Edward Norton - which is referenced simply as the narrator - when he says, "In the Tibetan philosophy, Sylvia Plath sense of the word, we're all dying. But you're not dying the way Chloe is dying."
In the film Not Another Teen Movie, protagonist Janey says "I read Sylvia Plath, I listen to Bikini Kill and I eat Tofu. I am a unique rebel."
♠Music♠
The song "The Girl That Wanted Be God" by the Manic Street Preachers from their 1996 album Everything Must Go is about Plath.
The song "Bloody Ice Cream" by Bikini Kill from their album, "Reject All American" is about Sylvia Plath. The lyrics are: "The Sylvia Plath story is told to girls who write/They want us to think that to be a girl poet/Means you have to die/Who is it/That told me/All girls who write must suicide?/I've another good one for you/We are turning/Cursive letters into knives."
The singer/songwriter Ryan Adams has a song named 'Sylvia Plath,' on his 2nd album 'Gold,' in which the singer imagines what he would do with Sylvia if they were to have met-'I gotta get me a Sylvia Plath/And maybe she'd take me to France/Or maybe to Spain and she'd ask me to dance/In a mansion on the top of a hill/She'd ash on the carpets/And slip me a pill'
In the song You Are the Moon by The Hush Sound there is a lyric "I will bring a mirror, so silver, so exact" referring to the poem "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath. Greta Salpeter, the singer/songwriter, is a known Sylvia Plath fan.
Liz Moore's song "Sylvia" is an ode to the life and plight of the troubled literary icon.
The British indie band Nine Black Alps is named after a line in one of Plath's poems.
Paul Westerberg's song "Crackle and Drag" is about Sylvia Plath and the title was taken from her poem, "Edge", which was written the day before her suicide.
The Ames, Iowa band The Envy Corps have a song titled "Sylvia (The Beekeeper)" which discusses in some detail, Sylvia Plath.
Others
Suicide Black Metal project, Lurker Of Chalice, uses a sample of Gwyneth Paltrow playing Plath from the movie "Sylvia"
'Sometimes, I feel like I'm not solid. I'm hollow; there's nothing behind my eyes. I'm a negative of a person — as if I never thought anything, never wrote anything, never felt anything. All I want is blackness — blackness and silence'
♠Links♠
♥http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl187/docs/plathpoem.html
♥http://www.sylviamovie.com/
♥http://www.poemhunter.com/sylvia-plath/poems/
Contributed By : Kat (Razor Heretic) |
|
