Word: plath
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is a myth that needs unmaking, and if we are to believe A. Alvarez's "Sylvia Plath: A Memoir" published in the New American Review 12, there is a hope that needs establishing. Sylvia Plath's life is closed to us, and so, therefore, is the truth about her life; we are left with some incomplete facts, a few more every day, her poetry, and the hope with which we construe the tale...
None of this is to say that Sylvian Plath did not want to die. Death possessed her more than life. But that in 1963 she intended only to flirt with death, to retreat from it, absolved by it, clears her poetry of much of the bitterness her suicide read into it, and allows the poetry an inkling of self-love in all the self-hatred. It means that it is no longer possible not to read her anymore, especially her last and most fleshless skeletons, now that there is the slender reed of her self-love to sustain the reader...
Although Sylvia Plath said to A. Alvarez, a whiskey in hand with one clinking ice cube in it, that she only missed the States for the clinks its abundant ice provided her drinks, clearly there was a tension in her, an almost geographical tension, created by her expatriation. This tension is only one of the ambiguities, the reticences, that stays her newly published collection from the calibre of her late and last poems contained in Ariel...
...Bell Jar, Plath...
...Bell Jar, Plath...