Resurrecting the Dead: Poetic Exorcisms in Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' & 'Lady Lazarus'

TW: Discussions of suicide

In this week’s episode of Beyond the Verse, the official podcast of PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+, hosts Joe and Maiya dive into Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection "Ariel," focusing on 'Daddy,' 'Lady Lazarus,' and other landmark poems from the collection.

The episode begins with an exploration of Plath’s life, from her early literary ambitions to the psychological and artistic forces that shaped her groundbreaking work. The hosts examine how "Ariel" redefined confessional poetry, channeling personal trauma, feminist resistance, and mythic reinvention into striking poetic forms.

Poetry+ users can get exclusive access to analysis, content, and PDFs, including the following that relates to this episode:

• Sylvia Plath PDF Guide
• ​Confessionalism PDF​
• 'Daddy':
  • Poem PDF Guide
  • Poetry Snapshot PDF
• 'Lazy Lazarus'
  • Poem PDF Guide
  • Poetry Snapshot PDF

Tune in and discover:

• How Plath redefined confessional poetry with "Ariel"
• The controversial imagery and feminist undercurrents in 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus'
• The themes of death, rebirth, and self-reinvention in Plath’s poetry
• Her influence on contemporary poetry and beyond

Transcript

Resurrecting the Dead: Poetic Exorcisms in Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' & 'Lady Lazarus' (Transcript)

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[00:00:00] 

Joe: Hello and welcome to Beyond the Verse, a poetry podcast brought to you by the team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+. I'm Joe and I'm here with my co host Maiya. We hope you enjoyed our mini series on the poets of the First World War, and if any listeners haven't checked out that mini series yet, please do so.

Three really interesting episodes. On Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon to kick off season two. But today we're moving on and we're going to be talking about one of the 20th century's most influential poets Sylvia Plath.

We're going to start with the poem Daddy, but we're actually going to have a bit of a sprawling conversation about lots of her different poems. We're going to be covering a lot of themes in this episode, including complex familial bonds, the influence of the Gothic, and the horrors of the 20th century.

But Maiya, before we get going into any of the individual poems, can you tell us a little bit [00:01:00] more about Sylvia Plath as a person, Sylvia Plath as a poet?

of course. So Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts to parents Otto and Aurel Plath. Now Otto is one of the central figures in the poem we're talking about today. Daddy and I cannot wait to discuss that a little bit more.

But in terms of key dates within her life, in 1950, she goes to college. This is where we understand that she begins to suffer bouts of depression. She attempts suicide and is hospitalized in 1953. But by 1955, she graduates and earns a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England.

This is where she meets fellow poet Ted Hughes. And by 1956, They're actually married. Now, they have one of poetry's most tumultuous relationships. Their poetry, in many ways, is very much defined by the other. When I say tumultuous, they had their fair share of ups and downs.

They had two children, but Ted [00:02:00] Hughes was discovered to be having an affair. They separated in 1962, just a year before Plath died by suicide having attempted it multiple times before 

in terms of her work in 1960 she published the Colossus and other poems. I'd say her second most famous collection After Ariel, a lot of the poems we'll be talking about today come from that collection, Ariel, which was published after her death.

But it's very interesting to note that her novel, The Bell Jar, was published in 1963, follows a semi autobiographical story. A young woman at a summer internship who suffers with bouts of depression is treated by electroshock therapy. And just a month later was when Plath died. ButJ oe, when it comes to the poetry, the myth around Plath, can you tell us a little bit more?

Well, I think the key word there, Maiya, as you said, is the word myth. I mean, when it comes to Sylvia Plath, the kind of figure, there's very few poets who occupy the kind of space that she does [00:03:00] in the public consciousness, the public imagination, right to this day. And in many ways, she is kind of the archetypal poet.

Certainly when it comes to young female poets, and again, we actually spoke , about archetypes in an episode we did in season one when we talked about William Wordsworth Because I think for a lot of people the romantic tradition is where kind of the image of the poet comes from, you know Rural, someone writing about flowers, somebody usually male and British and kind of old fashioned But in the 20th century context Plath and the confessional poets, and we're going to talk a little bit more about what I mean by that Later on, they occupy a really central space in the public imagination.

When we picture poets in the 20th century, we tend to picture people that resemble Plath and the other confessionals. Young, talented, taboo, willing to push boundaries, suffering with their mental health and doing that in a very public way. And I think that one of the things we're going to be hopefully doing in this episode is trying to peel back the myth and work out, okay, where does this come from, where is it accurate, and crucially, where does it differ from reality?

I [00:04:00] think one of the ways that Plath is kind of imagined in the public consciousness is massively down to the way that she writes and how this has been collated as well. You know, I'm thinking about the collection Ariel, so Daddy comes from this collection.

But the titular poem ends with these lines that, you know, even on a reread I think just hit so hard and contribute to the reason why people see Plath as this sort of fatally doomed, tortured poet, rather than a, almost a real person. And the lines go, And I am the arrow, the dew that flies suicidal, at one with the drive into the red eye, the cauldron of mourning.

There is this real sense that, you know, you kind of lose the person behind the story when you're just exploring work that was published after her death, it almost seems to answer for the questions that, you know, her life had.

It's the danger of all writers that explicitly draw upon their own [00:05:00] life, isn't it? You know, sometimes that can be a blessing, and sometimes it can be a curse, because I think when you have writers that are explicitly drawing upon their own lives, the temptation of readers to oversimplify, to kind of blur the edges of the reality in order to fit the narrative that works best, is one that's quite difficult for readers to ignore.

So Daddy is a really interesting poem and I know we probably say that about every poem we talk about on this podcast, but. Daddy is a confessional poem about Plath's relationship with her father. Her father died when she was eight, so actually this is written with a, an almost childlike voice. It sounds a little bit like a nursery rhyme and I'm sure we'll dive into why. But the actual content is incredibly powerful. She compares her relationship with her father to that of the victims of the Holocaust.

There is a real strong sense of hatred and anger and injustice in this poem. She routinely compares her father to an almost Hitler like figure. And [00:06:00] herself to someone who is suffering under that rule. There's a few lines I'd like to start with, and they come kind of towards the middle of the poem, and they go Every woman adores a fascist, , the boot in the face, the brute, brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, in the picture I have of you, a cleft in your chin instead of your foot, but no less a devil for that, no not any less the black man who bit my pretty red heart in two.

Now, we come to understand That Plath isn't just talking about her relationship to her father. She is talking about very complex familial relationships in general. It's generally assumed that as we move through this poem, she's also talking about her relationship with Ted Hughes.

She feels kind of embattled in both of these situations. She feels abandoned.

And one of the words that I'd really like to pick up on here is that repetition of brute. There is absolutely no escape from this. It is something that is completely concrete. The fascist, the brute, [00:07:00] the devil. These are all figures that amalgamate into something very, very dark. And it carries through the tone of this whole poem.

You know, you have this impression that Plath is being absorbed by this darkness.

I think that's one of Plath's real talents in her poetry, is that she manages to create a scene that is You know, all encompassing. But Joe, what do you think about those kind of, the personification of that devil figure, the comparison to, you know, a Nazi soldier, Hitler, it's not even a metaphor at that stage.

I think the thing that I would look to focus in these lines in particular is the way in which the Holocaust and the Nazis kind of replace those old religious paradigms in the 20th century. You know, in a society and in a Western world that was growing and continues to grow increasingly more secular every year, society doesn't stop looking for ways to express absolute evil or ways to express salvation, but when you have a less religiously literate readership, you have to find new ways of expressing evil. And [00:08:00] the Holocaust is the kind of most simple way of representing evil. And we do get mentions of devils. We do get mentions of gods in this poem, but they are kind of drowned out by constant reference to the Nazis, to the Holocaust, right down to the names of individual concentration camps.

And I think what we have here, you know, 17, 16 years, After the conclusion of the second world war, but around the time of the Adolf Eichmann trials in Israel, where the realities, the horrors of the Holocaust were televised to a live audience around the world. People really had an appreciation for the scale of the suffering that had occurred, , in Europe and beyond.

What Plath is doing is she's using that to represent evil. I mean, it's worth noting that Plath's father was not a Nazi.

He was not a Nazi sympathizer. And, you know, in many ways this is quite an unfair way to portray an individual by sort of pushing the weight of responsibility for this terrible crime against humanity onto his shoulders. But what it does is it. It [00:09:00] demonstrates how the Holocaust was coming to be viewed.

And I think to balance against that kind of very abstract way of talking about evil and the devil, one of the things that I find really interesting about the poem is how rooted it is in Plath's immediate physical context. Plath wrote the majority of the poems that went on to be an Ariel in a very, very intense period of creativity, in october of 1961 before her death the following year We know at this point that she was living with her two children 

in a house without her husband ted hughes. They'd separated a few months earlier we know the house didn't have a telephone. It was cold. It was damp It was actually one of the coldest winters of the 20th century in britain her children were frequently ill and we get some of these kind of somewhat sordid details of the way they were living and Plath herself at this point, was in the depth of a deep depression.

We know this because we know that her doctor actually wanted to have her institutionalized at the time. The way in which she balances certain details that reflect her personal experience [00:10:00] in these months with this kind of great sweeping symbol for evil in the 20th century is one of the things that makes this poem so enduringly powerful.

Absolutely. And the sense of finality we get towards the end of this poem, I absolutely adore how this poem ends. And as you said Joe, You know, it's not very often we get to talk about a poet and a speaker being almost one and the same, but here, because she's a confessional poet, because this is autobiographical, aside from, the small Fantasies that are added to it.

You can really feel the sense of self in this poem. And the end of this poem goes, The black telephone's off at the root. The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two. The vampire who said he was you. And drank my blood for a year. Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat, black heart and the villagers never liked you. And it ends with these lines, Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm [00:11:00] through. The sense of absolute completion. Confessional poets, one of the skills that they can acquire is to really channel this intense energy into a poem. And I always feel that with Daddy, the way that this poem ends, it feels like a lifting in a sense. There is a real sense of completion because Plath has channeled all of those feelings onto the page.

She ends by telling you, I'm done. I'm through. I'm not talking about this anymore. And obviously, it's very hard for us to divorce the fact that this poem was written and then within a year she was dead. I almost view this poem in the sense that she is kind of looking back through the years of her life and and picking out, you know, the worst bits and amalgamating them into one poem.

That darkness is completely, completely overwhelming here.

Yeah, these lines are really, really interesting. And I mean, the first thing that many listeners will be aware of is that Plath kind of blurs the boundary between this [00:12:00] male figure of her father. And the figure of her husband, Ted Hughes, is not named in this poem, but he appears to be this other vampiric figure.

So, I think the symbol of the vampire is obviously a fascinating one, and I mean, first and foremost, the conflation of the father and the husband. Well, Freudian critics, or anyone interested in the writing of Freud, will have an absolute field day with that. But, just focusing in on the kind of gothic imagery we get here.

On the one hand, the vampire is something undead. Something that has no mortal life and yet remains active in the world. Well, this is clearly the evocation of the father. Plath's father died when she was just eight years old, and yet, as we see in this poem, and in her broader life, his presence, his memory, thoughts about him kind of really intruded on Plath.

And clearly she feels kind of haunted by him in this sense. On the one hand, the vampire works because, like her father, it's a kind of undead presence in her everyday life. But then we look at the use of the vampiric imagery when applied to Ted Hughes, and it [00:13:00] becomes really interesting and really different.

Of course, when she wrote this poem, she was still alive. And yet, not long after this poem, a matter of months later, she was dead. Now, because they had never formally divorced and because she didn't write a will that means that Ted Hughes actually inherited her estate He edited an awful lot of her work and I know Maiya has a lot of thoughts about some of his edits and Whether or not they're a fair and honest reflection of the work that she was writing There's lots and lots of Plath admirers who are angry with Ted Hughes and what he did the decisions he made with her poetry but when he owned her estate and of course that means that he profited From the success that her work would go on to have not just Ariel but the bell jar and its various reprints There is something kind of vampiric about that because again the vampire survives by drinking the blood of others and he is kind of Profiting financially and in terms of his reputation On the back of her achievement on the back of the blood and sweat and [00:14:00] tears that she poured into her art 

Now, we don't want to do a disservice to Hughes and talk as though he didn't have an incredible poetic career in his own right. I mean, the collection Crow, for me, is one of the great books of the 20th century. And I'm sure Maiya and I are going to get onto his work at some point in a later episode. But it is worth noting that the economics of literature, which is quite rarely talked about, really, but it does really matter.

Who owns the estate? Who owns the right to publish? Who controls the voices and the way they are? Interpreted the way they are received is a crucial part of understanding poetry itself.

now, of course She could never have known that the vampire metaphor was going to be interpreted in that way because when she wrote it She was still alive, but It's a really interesting Example of how her poetry has had an afterlife that she had no idea was going to happen at the time that she was writing 

Absolutely, and it's a really interesting metaphor, I think, the vampire for over consumption. Because, as you say, Ted Hughes, in the end, owned everything. [00:15:00] And one of the things I think is really, really important to note here is that Ariel was edited, collated by Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath, before her death, had curated her manuscript as she wanted to publish it.

And after her death, Ted Hughes reordered the collection, he omitted 12 of the poems that Plath initially intended on being in, he added in some earlier ones, and effectively changed the narrative arc and the tone. I think it's completely critical that we don't look at these poems in isolation because they were put together in a collection for a reason.

And then Daddy is not a standalone, it sits with many of the other poems in Ariel, and In my research for this episode, I actually thought one of the most interesting tidbits was to do with the final poems in Ariel, In Ted Hughes's version of Ariel. The final lines are from the poem words and go from the bottom of the pool.

Fixed stars govern a life. Now. I think this is a really beautiful way to end Ariel, and actually if you go to a [00:16:00] bookstore and you pick Ariel off the shelf, this is probably the version of Ariel you're going to see, and it really contributes to that almost doomed fate that Plath had, because, you know, fixed stars govern a life.

It's always been a narrative thread that, your fate is written in the stars, what is going to happen will happen. But in Plath's edit, it ends with the poem, Sheep in Fog, and an earlier draft of the one that is actually published in Ted Hughes's version. And the final lines are, Sheep are in the fog, where there is no animal, only sky.

Nobody, only the dark hill, rising and rising. And this again contributes to Plath's own version, , how she wanted readers to leave this collection feeling. She wanted them to feel that sense of overwhelming darkness that was encroaching and encroaching. It wasn't a beautiful way to end the poem.

You know, it's written exceptionally well, but you feel very, very low [00:17:00] after leaving it. So I think when we talk about that kind of vampiric nature, not only are we talking about the way in which, Plath felt as if her life had been taken over by the trauma of what happened, but you have to look at the future as well, because her whole intention was changed.

She and the mythology surrounding her was completely consumed by the way in which Hugh's Created this, and as Joe said, we don't want to do a disservice to Hughes, he was, in his own right, an exceptional poet, and I'm sure we'll do an episode on him in the future, but that portrayal of Hughes, of her father, as a sort of vampire figure, I always think is really interesting because actually a lot of Plath's preoccupation in this poem and in others is the fact that she is able to bring herself back to life.

She is someone that attempted suicide multiple times throughout her life, was hospitalized, brought back, and it's an ongoing thread throughout her work that she is almost an immortal figure, she has nine lives, she is [00:18:00] reborn, and yet the fact that she chooses to portray, you know, the male figures in her life as something that's More cannibalistic or vampiric or however you'd like to put it is a fascinating one to me because actually if you look at the Content of her real life.

It almost suits her more

Just stepping away from Daddy for a moment, Maiya, I know you want to talk a little bit about Lady Lazarus, so could you tell us a little bit about what this poem is and why you think it's a, it's an important reference point to understand Daddy? 

Absolutely. Lady Lazarus is one of those poems that, of course gives you its intention from the outset.

Lazarus being a resurrected figure in biblical writing. However, what I really want to focus on here is actually the kind of theatrics of death to Plath. The way that Plath conceives of death is, quite casual and quite unexpected. She sees it as an art, as theatre. And in Lady Lazarus, we are introduced to a speaker Who dies and is resurrected [00:19:00] before a crowd.

She feels watched, she feels Undressed in front of these people, she talks about them as a peanut crunching crowd. There is a real distance from her sense of self and how other people perceive her. And there's a couple of lines where she says, Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've had a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell, it's easy enough to do it and stay put, it's the theatrical comeback in broad day to the same place, the same face, the same brute. Now this is obviously where the connection comes in, we use that language of the brute again.

I certainly feel when I read this poem that, you know, rather than Plath having any sort of escape, her speaker having any sort of escape, these small deaths, for her the third in this instance, Count as returns. And yet, instead of returning to a rebirth in which she has a new [00:20:00] lease on life, she is returned to the exact same places again.

So the question that I think she asks the reader is, you know, what does death mean, what does rebirth mean, if actually nothing changes? When we talk about the confessional poets, and Plath is one that comes up time and time again, of course it's very easy for us to say, this is real, she is writing about her experience.

But there is a level of fiction and theatre that she adds to this. Of course if she just wrote about her life with no dramatic flair or played with language, she would probably write quite boring poems. These poems are bright and effervescent and luminous, and they, Pick all of the dark spots and hit all the right places and the reason for that is because she is able to fictionalize some of those elements.

So the fact that she is telling you as the reader all of these little deaths are theater to me. She's almost interacting with you in in such a playful way. I think it's one of her real talents, [00:21:00] but I'd love to knowJoe, how do you think that theater and The kind of fact that she tells you, this is part fiction, how does that impact your reception of the poem?

I mean, it's one of the central issues when it comes to confessional poetry, isn't it? This idea of Where does the autobiography end and where does the fiction begin? And she brilliantly deconstructs this in this poem because she's playing with exactly that distinction.

She's telling us explicitly, this is theatrical, this is a performance, and yet the performance becomes a reality. It's really, really interesting. And I think that It's important to remember that when we're reading poets that are drawing upon their own lives, that it's possible to be emotionally honest while being factually dishonest.

And that might sound strange, you know, I know we live in a kind of an era where things like fake news or terms that get bandied around, but strictly in a poetic context, I think we can give a couple of examples to illustrate this. So Plath's father, for example, died when she was eight years old. And yet we know [00:22:00] in the poem, Daddy, she referred to it as when she was 10.

Now, there's something about the rounded number, the 10 years to the first decade that she was alive was bookended by her birth and by the death of her father. That is not what happened, as I mentioned, she was eight years old, but there's something about changing certain details. Those details, those small changes serve to keep the reader on their toes, for one, especially readers who are going to dive into the biography. They're going to look for those minute differences, but they don't make the work emotionally dishonest. I think that's a crucial thing. Now, in terms of Lady Lazarus more generally, I mean, it's a wonderful book.

piece of kind of blending of horror, really horrific imagery, again, drawing very heavily on the Holocaust, mixing in some biblical stuff. 

, I think going back to the point about theatre that you were making, Maiya, what I love about this poem is that it breaks the speaker physically down into their component parts.

We get bones in this poem. We get ash . We get [00:23:00] hands . We get teeth. We get rings. We get And this is both mirroring the way in which Jewish people in the holocaust had their Physical bodies broken down But it's also a symbol for the deconstruction of the artist, you know, Plath is playing with the ideas of what makes the performance Can you break it down? Can you distill it into its component parts and the experience of being broken down being deconstructed by others 

I love that you used that term, broken down, because as you were talking then, one of the things I was thinking was that so often when you read confessional poets, The light that shines on the personal is actually very often related to their sense of self fragmentation and Plath does this, I think, kind of throughout these poems, you know, to talk about Daddy or Lady Lazarus, there's a real sense of the, She doesn't feel whole or the speaker doesn't feel complete, And I think it's really interesting the way that you've considered that the public shines down to the personal.

Because, you know, I'm looking at [00:24:00] lines like from Lady Lazarus, Soon the flesh the grave cave ate will be at home on me, and I am a smiling woman. It's this idea that you have to, you know, keep calm and carry on, smile and keep going, despite these huge monumental events that are occurring , in your everyday life.

I think Daddy does a very similar thing, you know, using the Holocaust as a framing for a very deeply personal poem. is immediately going to tell your reader exactly what you want them to know. You want them to be horrified, you want them to be disturbed. What that does is almost cement Plath's personal point of view, because you can't see her father, her partner, as anything but monstrous.

You know, it doesn't take much once you've already mentioned one of the worst things to happen. In that period prior to the poem, you know, you can read it now, you can read it two days after it was published, and the impact is exactly the same

[00:25:00] when I'm reading a poem, there's nothing better for me than working with it on physical paper. So whether I'm teaching a poem to my students or just reading it for my own pleasure, I love to have the tactile piece of paper in front of me.

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just talking about the poem Daddy, I want to just focus for a moment on the soundscape of the [00:26:00] poem, the use of rhyme, the use of assonance in particular, particularly this ooo sound, this cooing sound. A lot of the words throughout the poem end in this ooo, and this is really interesting to me and I think it's doing several things at once, so let me just work through these on the first and foremost, I think it is an evocation of circumstance.

Again, Plath was writing these poems very intensely whilst looking after two small children. Those kind of childish cooing sounds were literally serenading her, if you will, while she was writing these poems. So it's no surprise that they might find their way in. But it's also a poem about the horrors of childhood returning in adult life.

So, We could almost view these sounds as a regression. As Plath, the adult, sat down to write this poem about the influence of her father, who died, of course, when she was a child, the sounds of her own childhood are manifest in the voice of the adult. I think that's a really interesting detail too. And I [00:27:00] think , The use of German is really, really interesting.

I mean, early on in the poem, we have the phonetic achoo that's meant to represent a sneeze, again, something completely innocent, completely innocuous. And yet within one stanza, the achoo becomes ach do and we slip into German. We slip into another language. And of course, the German is one of the things that we then get this strong evocation of the Holocaust.

And I think this is a really, Clever way of demonstrating the way that PTSD and trauma function that even innocuous Small innocent sounds can trigger somebody who has been traumatized in their life and take them back drag them back to a place They don't want to go

I think the use of German, as, as you pinpointed, is actually really important in this poem. You know, as you said, Plath does an incredible job of, you know, creating, a soundscape that really brings you to a particular moment in time, a particular setting. And one of the uses of German that really sticks out to me 

is in the sixth stanza of this poem, [00:28:00] where, you know, The speaker is essentially saying , they struggle to speak about their experience with their father and use this sort of metaphor of barbed wire.

They say, My tongue, it caught in a barbed wire snare. Ich, Ich, ich, ich, ich. 

ich in German means I. There is a sticking to the sense of self here. But also, the actual sound of the Ich, especially for English speakers, is one that is often found quite harsh, you know, the German language, I think, , has suffered greatly from the experiences of World War II, I think, the fact that she has incorporated a language that is so often found to be, you know, quite harsh, quite grating, has added to the experience of this poem by turning it back in on herself, using ich to represent her, her individual sense of self and something that is getting stuck in barbed wire, something that is used in warfare, something that causes pain, something that is hard to get through.

It almost creates [00:29:00] another barrier, not just the language barrier, but a physical barrier. To really understanding who she is in the absence of her father. She uses this again, later in the poem, where she says, Not God, but a swastika, so black no sky could squeak through. Squeak is a really interesting sound to pick up on here, The expected word, I would argue, would be squeeze through, It gives the sense of something small, It offers, a vision of a very, very black sky and, you know, the sun trying to shine through.

And instead of it being a physical gap, it's a, it's a sonic gap. It's a, it's a squeeze actually is so pressured that it causes noise. And I, I love the idea that she's using the history of this war and the language of this war to actually really turn the tables on the reader and create a sense of distance.

The only other thing I would say in terms of the sound of this poem is I don't want readers to fall into the trap of thinking that You know, all of this is negative. She has some really beautiful [00:30:00] phrasing, you know, when we're talking about the Atlantic in this poem, she says that it pours bean green over blue.

And again, this sense of a rolling river, the waves kind of crashing against the shore. It's created by the way in which those sounds kind of layer over one another. So by contrast, those harsher, more plosive sounds. I'm made that much more violent by this. But what do you think, Joe?

I'm so glad that you brought up that use of the word ich because it's something I'd like to focus on too and I think playful is not really a word we associate very much with Plath. I mean she's a very serious poet like her, you know, fellow confessionals they were. writing about very serious subject matter often considered taboo.

It's one of the things that separated them from that which came before them. You know, they would engage with topics like suicide and drug taking, abortion, et cetera. But I think this might be an example of Plath being playful or at least , kind of winking at the audience a little bit because one of the things that defines the confessional poet, aside from the subject [00:31:00] matter that I've is this use of the first person, the I.

And by just Turning slightly by using the same word, but in a different language She's playing with whether or not she's using that first person. It's the same. It is I but it's in a different language So it's kind of Adjacent to this word that was being used to criticize in some respects a confessionalist.

I mean, they weren't universally beloved A lot of people thought their work was too personal, was too sincere at times. So by using this word ich, by using the German, I think Plath is playing with different levels of fiction. She's almost speaking to the critic as well as to the reader She's highlighting the fact that she knows they're here because of this very personal eye But she's not going to give them straightforwardly what they want and by using a german word by using Something adjacent to the personal eye without it being the personal eye.

She throws the issue of whether this can be considered a truthful [00:32:00] and honest and realistic rendition of her own life into question.

I hadn't even considered, you know, looking almost at the starting lines of some of these poems. Because when we talk about the confessionals, I very often assume that at least in the first line, there's going to be a mention of the self or of I.

In Daddy, there's not. There is almost a rejection of the self here. The first line begins with you. This is a poem about her father, her partner, her relationship with them.

But it's not mediated through her sense of self. It's mediated through her experience of those people. It's again, that kind of self inflection. It's looking through other people to get to the self. It's a really fascinating point actually. I'd never really considered that.

You know, that expectation of it being an I poem has really been subverted here.

I love that point you make about being mediated through other people because for me this strikes at the heart of what we need to understand about the confessional movement because The confessional movement is often considered this kind of [00:33:00] turning inwards in the poetic world. The idea that these poets were doing something other people hadn't done before insofar as they turned their poetic gaze on their own lives, and every element of their own lives, no matter how previously taboo the subject matter had been.

To think of these poems as solely personal almost misses the point of why this happened at the time it did. These movements don't exist in a vacuum,

you know, we were talking in our miniseries about the First World War about how the poetry is in dialogue with the historical moment. They don't exist independently from one another, and it's the same here. There was a reason that these poets were turning inward.

I mean, let's look at the world in which these poets were working. You have the Cold War, the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation, you have the horrors of the Holocaust that we mentioned earlier on, which we think of as being obviously in the 1940s when the Holocaust took place, but

you know, most members of the public learned about the horrors gradually. And of course, the Adolf Eichmann trials I mentioned earlier on were a huge part of bringing that to the public imagination and really, [00:34:00] you know, bringing the horrors that occurred in Western Europe into people's living rooms. You could watch the trial on TV, hear the testimony.

And the Holocaust, of course, represents this kind of fundamental breaking of the natural order of the 20th century, people were suddenly exposed to what humanity could do to each other. The threat of nuclear war, as I've mentioned, the incredible sense of paranoia in the United States around spies and people who were being accused of espionage and spying for the Russians and all kinds of things.

I mean, What you have is less of a rejection of the public space and more an admission that one of the easiest ways to tackle these big public issues was through the private lens. The confessional movement is not underpinned by a rejection of wider society It's actually the imposition of the outside world on to the private It's the blurring of the distinctions between the private experience and the public experience the personal experience and the political experience and you know If I [00:35:00] could just read the opening line of Plath's novel The Bell Jar Which is published just one month before her suicide It was initially published under a pen name and I think this really captures something about what I'm talking about here And it reads like this.

It was a queer, sultry summer. The summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. And I didn't know what I was doing in New York. Now, those lines are worth reading because they're brilliant anyway. It's one of the great opening lines of literature. But what we have in that opening line is exactly the kind of blending of the public and the personal that I was talking about.

The Rosenbergs were a couple who were executed for spying for Russia. They were an American couple. They're the only. people executed for that kind of crime outside of wartime in American history. So this sense of paranoia, this sense of a case that swept the nation is laid out alongside personal indecision.

The character in the bell jar resembles [00:36:00] Plath. Her own personal sense Of uncertainty and angst that you know young people go through is playing out amidst these huge geopolitical concerns and it's that relationship between Interiority and the external world that is at the core of what the confessional movement is all about 

I think to stray from Daddy really briefly, one poem that massively illuminates this point is Tulips. Tulips is a poem written by Plath. Based on the experience of lying in a hospital bed, being gifted a vase of tulips, and staring at them, and feeling overwhelmed by their brightness, what they represent.

And I absolutely love how tulips does exactly what you were saying,Joe. It refracts Plath's self back at her, and it's one of the poems where her sense of self is really, really weak. Intentionally weak, I'll say, but She's completely dislocated from her own body.

The poem is, you know, almost foggy in a [00:37:00] lot of ways. And a few lines that I'd like to pick up on, I'd love to know how you feel about these lines, Joe. I have let things slip, a thirty year old cargo boat, stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. She describes herself as an eye between two white lids that will not shut, and she even explicitly states,

I am nobody. I have nothing to do with explosions. It's very easy for us, I think, when we talk about poems like Daddy to assume that Plath was kind of this incredibly powerful, explosive, and bold figure. Someone who was completely unafraid to, you know, make bold statements and be controversial. But in poems like Tulips, she introduces a softness that we very rarely see and I think it's a really beautiful poem to contrast against Daddy, because Tulips offers a much more gentle view of Plath, as someone who, you know, was suffering, and was struggling, [00:38:00] and felt overwhelmed by things, and that sense of, fragmentation, or Or split sense of self.

She describes herself as a cut paper shadow. Not only is she physically split, cut in half, but she is also a shadow of a solid thing. There is so much to say about this poem, but I mean, Joe, of the lines I mentioned, what, what sticks out to you the most?

Thanks, Maiya. So I think I'd like to talk a little about ownership in this poem, and I think it's one of the things that I found myself returning to again and again when it comes to thinking about confessionalism because when you're any kind of artist every time you create something you give a piece of yourself to the process but when you're a confessional artist or somebody that draws very closely on your autobiography you're kind of doing that in an even greater sense because you are giving your own life to other people you're laying the reality bare even if as I've mentioned earlier on you certain cursory details about your life it's still Your experience that you're giving up and I think we see that really strongly in [00:39:00] this first answer of tulips and I'll just read a couple of lines.

I am nobody I have nothing to do with explosions I have given my name and my day clothes up to the nurses and my history To the anesthetist and my body to the surgeons. There's a couple of things I want to focus in on here One is this repetition Of the possessive pronoun my name my day clothes my history my body And again, we almost have this kind of back and forth between the description of how she has surrendered these things And yet the use of the word my acts as a kind of a counterweight to that Yes, she has surrendered them and yet they remain her property There is a kind of tension there about is this still my story once i've given it up?

And the next thing I think is when you place These Symbols and they are metaphors and not literal when you give somebody your name, it means you simply tell them your name. You don't relinquish it You don't actually give it away same with history in a medical context like this one when [00:40:00] the doctor Talks to you about your medical history.

You are giving them your history and yet when Plath lists them in this manner It is as though she gives them these things and she cannot reclaim them. And there was a really interesting kind of metafictional way of exploring what it means to be a confessional artist. When you hand these people, and by these people, I mean readers, critics, fellow poets, when you give up your story.

As Plath did, and as Plath was doing as she wrote this poem. Does it still belong to you? Can you reclaim it? Can you continue to shape your own life? I mean, these are hugely difficult questions to answer and the fact that she's able to pose them with such clarity while writing the poem, I think is absolutely fascinating.

I think that's a really fascinating point, Joe. So, so thank you so much. I think it actually really helps to, to elucidate one of the points I wanted to make, which was Plath's use of the elemental as well. Tulips is a [00:41:00] poem very much concerned with, with water and air, things that are purifying, things that make her light.

You know, we have this image of her as a cargo boat. By the end of the poem, she tastes water that is warm and salt like the sea. It brings her comfort. It is something that she looks forward to receiving. And I think it's such a great poem to contrast with Daddy, because two of the things that on a reread I've picked up from Daddy is the fact that it's a poem concerned more with fire and the earth, you know, Her father's foot in real life, he was a diabetic, he was diagnosed with gangrene, so his foot was literally rotting because of blood circulation. But here she imagines it as a root, something that is connected to the earth. In the process of it dying, it roots him to the earth, and because Plath feels she doesn't have that, she is therefore unrooted. Again, the pretty red heart that she describes, that is fire and anger. It roots back to the first quote I mentioned, which was [00:42:00] from Ariel, the red cauldron of mourning. A very, very beautiful way of stating the sun, but again, this speaks more to the sort of passionate, fiery anger of the sun.

She focuses more so on the intensity and the burning heat of it than she does the fact that it offers any sort of growth or regeneration. Water is something that offers her peace time and time again throughout these poems. As we said, the bean green over blue of this poem is the only moment of respite.

And in Tulips, she's looking to go towards the water.

Plath does an absolutely incredible job of using the colour of these elements. I think air is very often correlated with white in her collection, water is often kind of blue, blue or green, fire is red, an earth is often kind of portrayed as almost a, a, a sludge, a green or a black,

I always, always call back to one of my favorite poems of Plath, which is the moon and the yew tree, which opens with, This is the light of the mind, cold [00:43:00] and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. This is Plath arguing that her experience of reality is that rootedness, it is the black trees, it is the feeling of Absolute despair, and the light that is blue, that is shining, are those small moments of respite.

But,Joe, I know you've got something to say, so please, go ahead on that.

Yeah, thanks Maiya. It's just, you know, a bit of appreciation really for how brilliantly Plath is able to subvert our expectations around particular objects or particular feelings and you know, gold I think is a really interesting one and you know the poem that I think I'd like to just quickly direct readers attentions to is the poem Morning Song which begins with the line Love sets you going like a fat gold watch.

And again, what she's able to do there is take the connotations of gold, which are largely positive. It's about value. It's about rarity. You know, we talk about gold jewelry, et [00:44:00] cetera, et cetera. She's able to take that symbol of value and of pleasure and of wealth and make it about excess, make it about gluttony, make it about overindulgence.

And She uses gold brilliantly throughout her poetry. I mean, we mentioned earlier on, you know, her poems drawing upon the imagery of the Holocaust. And of course, gold has a very troubling history in that context because gold teeth were one of the objects that were extracted from the corpses in the concentration camps to be repurposed.

And again, you have this Oddly vampiric effect. I mean, circling back to daddy and our conversation earlier on this idea of sustaining yourself economically, not so much in terms of your actual life, the vampire needs the blood to survive, but sustaining yourself economically by killing others, and of course, German soldiers and German. Officers in the concentration camps took physical objects out of the bodies of the people they were killing. And the way in which she's able to kind of [00:45:00] imply that things that are valuable have a sordid and dark past is really, really impressive in this poem and in others.

For sure, and, you know, at the risk of kind of adding more to that mythology, I love that point you made about gold, but let's not also forget, her mother was called Aurelia. That comes from the Latin, Aurelius, which means, of gold. Every time gold is mentioned throughout this collection, you know, we talked about Otto, we talked about the presence of her father that looms large.

Her mother's presence looms just as large. There are multiple references to the moon that are often understood to be this kind of overwhelming presence of her mother on how she should act and how she should carry herself.

I think it's a really fascinating thing, as Joe said, Plath is so skillful at kind of navigating and negotiating those expectations when you walk into one of her poems, and just as fantastic at subverting them. You know, even halfway through a poem, it can mean something at the start and completely change [00:46:00] meaning by the end.

So, if I want to leave listeners with any sort of message coming out of this episode, is that You should read her body of work, read her revised collection of Ariel, look at the differences between Ted Hughes's edited collection and her own, and understand how the mythology came to be, but look at these poems as a collection of the person, like every single poem to me is, is a piece of that fragmentation we were discussing earlier in the episode.

So Plath is, one of those writers who I think is fundamental if you're beginning to understand poetry. She is an absolutely excellent example of how to use metaphor and color and elements and self experience and internalization and externalization.

She has a poem for everything, so I would massively recommend you go to Poemanalysis.com, read some of her work that we've got on the site because it's just incredible.

Yeah, I would just echo that sentiment, Maiya. There are over 50 of [00:47:00] Plath's poems on the website right now for you to go and read. I mean, we've touched on a few of them today, but there are so many more out there that we've analysed brilliantly on the website for you. And don't forget that if you're a Poetry+ subscriber, you can also get access to the Sylvia Plath PDF in the PDF Learning Library.

There's also a PDF on the Confessional Poets in there, and of course, individual PDFs on other Confessional Poets. Like Robert Lowell and Sexton, et cetera. That was a brilliant conversation. I really enjoyed having it with you, but can you tell us what we're going to be talking about in next week's episode of Beyond the Verse?

I absolutely can. Next time we are talking about T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, and I for one cannot wait. But for now, it's goodbye from me.

And goodbye from me and the whole team at PoemAnalysis.com and Poetry+.