ART AS A SOURCE OF SELF TRANSFORMATION - A STUDY OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY
Ms. S. Anitha
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Akshaya College of Engineering and Technology
Kinathukadavu, Coimbatore.
Mail id:
ABSTRACT
American literature takes a new turn in the seventeenth century in a search for the ideal, a search lighted and directed by hope and expectation.Sylvia Plath is reckoned as a very important poet of American literature. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. Her poetry is evasive, intriguing, intelligent and intense. Plunging deeper in her psyche, one finds her to be a poet of extraordinary positive urge. A person as ambiguous and self-contradictory as Sylvia Plath can hardly be fitted into a single critical jargon or simple formula.
Attempt has been made in this paper entitled “Art as a source of Self Transformation – A Study of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry” to analyse the important aspects of her poetic being, from its nascent source to full maturity and explores Plath’s struggle for existence. It analyses the constant echo of her life and personality in her creative work.The diverse channels of her theme and art, ranging from psyche and spiritual bearings contribute a lot to shape her poetic career.
KEY WORDS: Art as a source of Self Transformation
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is deeply personal but as she says experience should not be a kind of shut - box and mirror - looking narcissistic experience. It should be related to larger historical events like war, concentration camps and so on. It is obvious that her subjects are her own mental breakdown. This leads her to self transformation. She does not describe her mental breakdown as catastrophic; it gives her an opportunity for regeneration or revival of life. Her verbal skills make her tortured mind meaningful. Her personal experiences are dramatised in her poem. Though the content of her work is personal, her attitude towards it and treatment of it are frequently detached and impersonal. Her poems dramatise a struggle for existence as the personality lives through repeated encounters with death. Through her poem the most important thing that strikes her readers is the constant reverberation of her life and her personality, creating echoes in her creative work.
The passion for success was unduly balanced by the unusual fear of failure. Mainly the success and frame that encircled her was the result of intelligent planning sharp foresight and untiring energy and yet there were moments of skepticism and self - doubt. After her marriage to Hughes, her life gave new meaning and confidence and she spent all her spare time reading, writing and discussing her work with her husband. She was drinking deep in the fountain of creative happiness, both conjugal and artistic. During the first few months of her marriage there was a sense of joy and achievement. Her marriage helped her a lot to settle down her turbulent feelings of uncertainty and disintegration. It did not transform her over - powering ambition to docile domesticity. In her life she never experienced such perfect conditions. Her poetry urges us to delve deeper as far as we can go dispersing the seeds of myths, psychological assumptions, challenging us to find the truth. She enwrapped her volcanic personality in a gentle, unassuming garb.
One would be astonished to see the passionate anger of the modest, nervous and formal girl bursting into highly controlled emotional bouts of poetry. She hated being thwarted in any of her artistic pursuit or even in the happenings of life beyond human control. This heroic, courageous spirit has adorned her personality. Her art sparkled with the halo of violent emotions. Her personality as well as her poetry hint surely at the transcendence of the moral self as well as the redemption from the mortal and the spiritual sin. She was more interested in enriching her experience with the over - changing glories of life, thus adding dimensions to her poetic sensibility. Her whole life meandered through success and sufferings to reach this goal of ultra - achievement which is almost beyond human reach and sustainability.
The two sources of happiness in her life were her babies and her bees which she got as legacy from her husband and her father respectively, both of them were endless sources of love and hate to her. The volume Ariel is one of the last poems of her academic period. The theme of this volume is concerned with same old conflict and contradictions between love and hate, life and death in her personal as well as universal terms. Her Thesaurus was her main source of inspiration. The distinguishingly smart and efficient wording of her early poetry takes one way from the actual Plath to different etymological sources or literary influences. She achieves the magic of poetic glory simply by the force of ordinary colloquial speech. In her early poetry, we see Plath concentrating on the visual and descriptive form of poetry and she chooses her metaphors and images only to substantiate that.
The literary evolutions of her work have a way of turning into moralising, because of her own fleeting references to the disorders of her life and that of others. Similarly noteworthy is the fact that as a poet, she tries neither to prescribe nor to escape an existing order, exacting no demand for reform. She has a vision of life’s imperfections. Her poetry bears testimony to fits of despondency.
The message reverberating through her poetry is the note of ‘survival’ an urge towards re - creation. The profile that emerges, as one goes on reading her entire work, is undoubtedly a striking consistency in her view and vision and execution there of. There is an astonishing immediacy bound by artistic control; and an incrementally valuable insight within herself, within the whole cultural - historical society of her days, that can be accredited as accurately to this time also.
Her poetry still retains the same flavour and fervour of inspired ecstasy after decades of her melodramatised death; which in its turn goes to point to the inherent poetic base and aesthetic character of her poetry. It offers such a bewildering range and strata of experiences that it moves easily from a mere personal level to the universal level. Her poetic being, showing her as a woman oppressed, a suicide case, a victim of her own passion or as a doomed talent, help little in understanding her art.
Sylvia Plath was a sensitive young woman battling against the forces of society and her demons. She strived hard to transform her imagination. Her poems seem to make an attempt to raise the existence of the poet to a level of transcendence. Sylvia Plath’s poems are marked with openness and honesty. In poem after poem she deals with the closest of human relationship with her father, mate, and child. She reveals her bitter, tormented, unappeasable emotions. She sets them in brilliant colours conveying their intensity.
In her apprentice days, she was busy spreading her roots in the rich soil of the American tradition in poetry, finding her exact place permanently. Her individualism had yet to find path for her idiosyncrasies and poignant personal experiences. As a teenager she had learnt the brute realities of life and experienced all the ghastly shadows, yet she hated to be a defeatist. Her immense urge for life found its apt voice in the poem. While looking at the nature’s renovative power, her young heart was filled up with a bright new hope that setting of the sun is but a geographical myth. As bunches of the new leaves sprout up with hopeful anticipation with the enlivening shower, there is also hope for the transiently finished mortal to be resurrected.
The theme she chose for her early poems continued to remain the predominant factor of her later poetry also, coming out as they did from the cauldron of her passionate participation of life. Her art is the perfect translation of her poignant personal experiences throughout. Only the expression becomes far more pointed along the way, not only startling but also deep delving. Being a perfectionist and a fastidious artist, she just could not help being extra cautious about her artistic finesse, in consequence of which the feeling within her poetry had to suffer constriction at the primary level. But later on, the poet certainly shows a deep perception and the vision of a philosophical prophet examining life from a distance with here unfailing objective intuition.
Inspite of the negative attributes of life offered to her, she had a dominant, but dormant voice of faith awaiting upon her deeper consciousness. The poems Tulips, In Plaster, Moon and The Yew Treebear strong testimony for this. She knows now how to cope with here nihilistic feelings, how to steer her confused gropings to a perfect poetic articulation. Love was the crying need for her at that moment - both to be loved and to give love in face of all odds. The passion was prevalent in her cautiously written early poetry. She prepared herself to tutor that essential passion into finely etched out sculpted poetry. She was quite aware of the “imminent volcano” seething within her. Almost in calculated and cool self - defence, she planned to erect those carefully built flawless structural form which eventually became the expression of her faith that she could yet make it somehow to the living, talking, walking normal human life.
The study of mankind and the study of her own self reveal her confrontation and victimisation of death. This lead to the wisdom, that death is not finale. There is a hope for rebirth. Through the course of her poetic development she got that illumination. In her early poems, she did not involve herself deeply in the poetic pursuit giving vent to all her private agonies with suitable mythical mask. But her later poems reveal her tumultuous passion of surface taking the plunge into deeper mysteries of life. Accordingly she moves from the tradition mode to open form, dynamic expression. She achieved the artistic control only after practicing it a lot during the early days. Her last poems are remarkable evidences for her unified creation, for her forceful passion in perfect co - ordination with rhythmical structure.
Writing poetry was neither an adolescent fancy nor an extra adornment because Plath was already a brilliant personality. But it was a passion for living which engaged her entire gamut of physical and spiritual experiences. More important was she makes that passion her chosen profession also. This is how her poetry and her life became, one feeding on another, leaning on one another in distress as in ecstasy. And this is why she was eager to publish every bit of her writing in fashionable magazines which boasted large circulation. Obviously, she wanted to reach out to the world. The passion that whirled within her intensely and expansively cried out to hurl itself on the face of the world. This process of ‘reaching out’ to understanding, intelligent and sensitive readers is an important factor in her poetic personality as her tendency of delving deep in the darker recesses of a dubious self. Sylvia Plath also had a coolly calculating practical side in her many - faceted personality. This is what urged her to pave way for her planned future while making herself busy to learn and practice all the technical knowledge to perfection that went to make sound poetry.
The sum and substance of the apprentice poems was completely dominated by visions of despair, terror and the pull of opposition between life and death which, incidentally, was to become the eternal warring force in her poetry. The destroying factor of time, the dilapidated courses of man’s history which she picked up so enthusiastically in poem after poem, corresponded closely with her own shattered dreams and battered happiness. But howsoever small and shy, she made clear the note of sprouting greens from the burnt out hopes.
The theme of despair and death with that faint but audible sighs of hopeful faith had been set up in traditional mode in these earlier poems, though in linear, disciplined and mostly narrative order. She had shown considerable contempt in her memories and other writings. Howsoever insignificant to her these poems might be they nevertheless bear testimony to the essential development of her poetic thought and expression, as she went on creating new legend, exploring unique horizons and probing yet deeper within the eternal chiaroscuro of the psyche. The poetic current had obviously taken a sharp turn. A new breakthrough was emerging in the form of thematically turbulent but artistically flawless creations - which she had earmarked in The Colossus. There is a persistent thematic unity in all her poetic efforts. She was still looking for her right ‘voice’ in which her ‘passion’ could be duly submerged. Hence, she gave full vent to the ‘passion’ that fumed and raged within. This is how she practiced control over her turbulent emotions as well as on her art.
The poems Lady Lazarus and Daddy are more complicated to call upon specific incidents in Plaths’s biography, her suicide attempts and her father’s death. Lady Lazarus has a phoenix - like rebirth, after the ritual death. There is a broad hint at the actual suicide attempt of the poet as well as the long painful drama of self - exposure to the voyeurist public, finishing on a mocking and hysterically determined not of a vengeful come back. The lady of the Lazarus is a quasi - mythological figure, the biblical Lazarus, whom Christ raised from the dead. Taking recourse to this myth, she enacts her own death, creating a series of apt images to depict the series of transformations that the lady undergoes. Inevitably, she draws upon images from the Second World War; as nothing less horrible than the Nazi operations could describe properly her psychic disintegration, her terrible humiliating anguish to be made a sight, in front of the fun - seeking, insensitive public. It is true that she wanted only intelligent readers for other poetry - as sensitive and as aware as herself, for the simple reason that only such persons can apprehend the intellectual aloofness and the aesthetic sincerity with which she analyses her own agony, victimisation and desperate will to live and fight.
The poem Daddy is one of Sylvia Plath’s best poems and it is a shocking piece. In this poem her feelings of hate, rage, fury and abandonment are conveyed in a simple but powerful use of language, metaphors and rhyme. This poem introduced the poet’s feeling of entrapment into her father’s control then to the grief and pain she felt and later to the replacing image of her dead father with that of her husband until. She in a destructive proud voice kills their memory and is “through” with them.
Daddy, I have had to kill you
You died before I had time
Daddy
There are no words to express the grief. She is being rejected from her father’s love and life. The rhyme used in the poem expresses a more complex defiance and rage at a father who confined his daughter like a foot laced into a shoe. The poet suffers from suicide attempts, the patchwork of psychoanalysis and conscience which she plants in her father’s breast.
The self - renunciatory search for knowledge starts from one’s inner soul in all cases but it extends to limitless horizon thereafter. Her deepest plunge into the soul had finally shown her the way out from the labyrinth of earthly associations: “Not you, nor him / Not him, nor him / My selves dissolving”.
Plath’s poetry is typically criticized for its histrionic display of emotion, excessive self - absorption, inaccessible personal allusions, and nihilistic obsession with death. Some critics object to references of the Holocaust in her later poetry, which in the context of Plath’s private anguish are viewed inappropriate. However, most agree that Plath’s best poetry converts personal experience and ordinary affairs into the mythopoetic.
Her tribute to poetry and her contribution to the continual survival impulse of man are her spiritual urge, intensified by aesthetic energy. Her determined effort to make life again solid and fruitful, despite the despairing condition and rejection in personal and professional front is evident in the letters written to her mother during this period. This letter written in October 16, 1962, clearly states how her life and art was one unified whole to her and how determined she was to make unique success of them. David Holbrook in his book Sylvia Plath : Poetry and Existence she says,
To make a new life . . . I feel only a lust to study, write, get my brain back and practise my craft . . . I have no desire but to build a new life. Must start here . . . I must not go back to the womb or retreat. I must make steps out. I am fighting against hard odds and alone. (p. 296)