Word: plath
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...writing a "teenage symphony to God"--if it hadn't collapsed under the weight of Wilson's ambition and mental illness. I love this CD. I love its raw beauty, but even more, I love its wasted promise. (This is a boy example; girls can substitute Sylvia Plath's burned journals.) I also love the illicit access to Wilson's half-finished thoughts, to Wilson himself. Does this make me a romantic or a mild kind of stalker...
...SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963) The searing poems she wrote just before her suicide in 1963 made her a literary and feminist martyr. Her onetime mentor Robert Lowell described her last works as "playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Plath's poem to her long-dead father redefined confessional writing: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like...
Hughes' account of this shared history and Plath's ruinous effect on it may or may not be accurate--and only a fool would attempt to parse another person's marriage--but it makes a poor premise for poetry. Lyric poems draw their energy from an active voice discussing the life choices, good or bad, it has made. Hughes portrays himself as a fern in a hurricane beyond his control. He gives only one poem, Dreamers, to the woman who broke up his marriage to Plath. In it he writes: "The Fable she carried/ Requisitioned...
...What happens in the heart simply happens," Hughes writes at one point, a comment that can serve as an epigraph or epitaph for all the words surrounding it. For Hughes' account of his life with Plath rests on two complementary premises: she was destined to kill herself because of her preoccupation with her father, who died when she was eight; and Hughes was powerless to help...
This argument is established early in Birthday Letters, when Hughes records meeting Plath, a Fulbright scholar, at Cambridge University in 1956: "I was being auditioned/ For the male lead in your drama." A tempestuous courtship soon gives way to an equally stormy marriage: two ambitious poets--one English and reserved, the other American and outwardly exuberant but secretly troubled--yoked together in an initial ecstasy that eventually subsides into mutual misery. Hughes, in his telling, learns that Plath has brought problems along with her "long, perfect, American legs." He becomes acquainted with her "homicidal/ Hooded stare," her "dybbuk fury...