Word: plath
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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HEARING MANY of these poems--there are thirteen in all--is a completely different experience from reading them. Plath's tone or inflection often brings out a sinister sadness that is only latent in the printed word. The well-known poem "Cut," for instance, can be read merely as a strangely detached, almost innocent investigation of an everyday occurrence; but when Plath reads it, it is savage...
Sometimes Plath's reading gives these poems a meaning that appears to be unintentional. During the climactic lines of "Lady Lazarus," a poem about the poet's repeated suicide attempts, her usually well-modulated voice seems to shake involuntarily...
Anyone hearing these lines now cannot help being reminded that three months after recording them, their author put her head in a gas oven. But as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, it is a mistake to view Plath's poems in the light of her suicide; like all good poetry, they stand on their...
...poems on this record were all written to be read aloud, as Plath says in the interview, but there are two in particular--"The Applicant" and "Daddy"--that are so obviously meant to be heard, it's almost impossible to read them without at least whispering them to yourself. And the reading that Plath gives them here leaves them with an indelible echo, so that they are never the same again. Both poems are essentially chants, with hard, driving rhythms, and recurring sound patterns. In "The Applicant" the repetition is clipped...
...sound of both poems, and particularly "Daddy," is compelling, mesmerizing, and finally, frightening. In them, Plath creates most successfully the new kind of poetic effect she was striving for in her last months, an effect she discusses in the interview with Peter Orr of the British Council...