Hard truth

Martin SEYMOUR-SMITH

The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium edited by Charles Newman (Faber 50s) The suicide of Sylvia Plath in 1963, and the publication of the poems she had written in the three years preceding it, understand- ably provoked much confused criticism— and more atrocious elegies. Whether she was a 'minor poet of great intensity' (Steiner) or a major 'Extremist' poet (Alvarez), or whether these are merely the valueless terminology of embarrassed criti- casters, her poetry is powerful and disturb- ing to complacency. Most people are dedi- cated to the surfaces of their lives, and this protects them from what Alvarez calls the 'murderous' stresses of poetry; for Sylvia Plath in her last months the surface of life —with children and ill-health as distrac- tions—literally was her poetry. One thing is certain: this woman could not have written more powerfully and truly than she did. The same cannot be said for all poets.

Critics or fashionables to whom the most important thing is always what is happening in the current week were re- lieved because the subject-matter of Sylvia Plath's final poems was ostensibly a cus- tomary horror: hospitalisation, the death- camps of the Second World War, and so on. Such familiar consternations being a part of their prattle—or, at best, their evasion of seriousness—they well more easily able to neutralise the undeniable power of the poems by labelling them as, so to speak, 'humanly c entral': thus, George Steiner writes, in an essay that is intelligent until it comes to the point, that 'her last, greatest poems culminate in an act of identi-

fication, of total communion with those tortured and massacred'.

This symposium on her work illustrates a general tendency. Not many critics like to concern themselves with poetry itself, or with the too disturbing question of what it is; they evade it by escaping into abstrac- tions. Even Alvarez, who understands that it is a product of stress, tends to lose sight of Sylvia Plath herself in creating his own programme for an 'Extremist poetry', and can be as silly and self-revealing as to pronounce 'the chances are that the more hip the art, the squarer the life of the artist who creates it'.

Treated as a major figure, an expositor of giant themes whose work 'defines the age as schizophrenic' (A. R. Jones on 'Daddy), and as an excuse to discuss the question of the relationship between crea- tivity and illness, Sylvia Plath has not in fact had her due—the proper attention that is the due of any poet—and she hardly gets it here. There are of course some valu- able essays: examples are a skeleton bio- graphy, necessarily incomplete, by Lois Ames, and an account of the chronology of the poems by Ted Hughes.

But in general the central and really diffi- cult questions—the actual subject-matter of the poems, the fact that Sylvia Plath was a woman—are evaded, and we get instead continual, solemn discussion of the artificial

problem of whether the poems of Ariel were anticipated by those in The Colossus or not. This is rather like spending consider- able time on tracing the antecedents of 'The Ancient Mariner' or 'Kubla Khan' in 'Re- ligious Musings'.

The fact is that we must first treat Sylvia Plath's final poetry as a description of

mental illness—rather than of death-camps or 'the contemporary predicament'. To do so will tell us much about the nature of mental illness; and the nature of mental illness tells us much about the nature of the mind itself, and perhaps even of the death-camps . . . Sylvia Plath used the facts of the German persecution of the Jews, and other hideous contemporary facts, as a frame of reference in her poetry; but when she felt herself to be 'a bit of a Jew' she was not just reacting with horror at history ---that is a superficial aspect of her feelings —she was writing from a personal and sick situation.

Alvarez says that she 'gambled . . . and lost', implying that she 'did it' for poetry.

This is an evasion. Her particular integrity —and no one denies her integrity—was to remain a poet, to remain truthful, while she was ill: just as Coleridge sometimes remained a poet when he committed himself to face-saving dogmas, or as Wordsworth

sometimes did when he realised that he physically desired his sister, or as Wallace Stevens occasionally did when he condoned American methods of selling insurance. Certainly poetry transcends its often sordid or horrific occasions—madness, piety, incest, salesmanship—but in order best to under- stand how and why it does this, and to what eitent, it is necessary to look closely into its origins.

But so many critics insist on the myth of human dignity, and thus avoid examining the nature of the humiliations and the in- dignity that so often characterise the origins of poetry. They would do well to recall

Kenneth Burke's words: . . there seems to be a thirst for personal dignity. There is a trace of the hysterical, the devious, in this need for dignity. Dignity belongs to the conquered a k One meets facts objectively

without dignity . . Manic-depressive ill- ness (for I see no evidence that Sylvia Plath's illness was 'schizophrenic') is in no sense dignified; but she made it meaningful. The subject of her poetry is suicidal depres- sion, and it tells us more about this than it tells us about 'the schizophrenic world', which is itself an abstraction.

Like Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson and Laura Riding—a modern poet whose work has been imitated by many, but who remains neglected—Sylvia Plath was a woman. This is another fact hardly faced by her critics. For the poetry of women who are not content to imitate men, who will be content with nothing less than the expression of their whole personalities, pre- sents special problems: it is altogether different from the poetry of men, as well as being much rarer. Was Sylvia Plath a poet of the order of Emily Dickinson or Laura Riding—or did she, despite her great in- tensity, inhabit an essentially male ambi- ence? Only a psychologically close examina- tion of her work could answer this.