The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Crash Course Literature 216

Summary

In this Crash Course Literature episode, John Green explores Sylvia Plath's poetry, emphasizing her feminist perspective and use of metaphor. He discusses Plath's life, including her early success, struggles with depression, and tragic suicide at 30. Green highlights her posthumous Pulitzer win and her famous collection 'Ariel.' He also touches on her confessional style and the emotional authenticity of her work, which continues to resonate with readers.

Takeaways

• 📚 Sylvia Plath is often misunderstood as a 'patron saint of sad teenage girls', but her work goes beyond that stereotype.
• 💪 Plath is recognized as a feminist poet who wrote about women's struggles before feminism was mainstream.
• 🌟 Her poetry is known for its powerful imagery and energetic language, transforming everyday experiences into significant metaphors.
• 🔪 In 'Cut', Plath uses the experience of cutting her thumb to create vivid and disorienting imagery, showing her skill in making the mundane profound.
• 👨‍👩‍👧 Plath's biography is deeply intertwined with her work, including her father's death, her struggles with depression, and her marriage to Ted Hughes.
• 🏆 Despite her tragic death by suicide at age 30, Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
• 📖 'Ariel', published posthumously, is one of her most famous works and showcases her intense and emotional poetry.
• 😈 'Lady Lazarus' is a brutal, angry, and morbid poem that also carries themes of empowerment and hope.
• 🌺 'Tulips' explores themes of recovery and attentiveness, showing the difficulty and reward of being human.
• 👀 Plath's poetry is characterized by its emotional authenticity and frankness, which continues to resonate with readers.

Q & A

Who is Sylvia Plath and why is she significant in literature?

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry. She is significant for her deeply personal and confessional verse, as well as her exploration of themes such as death, femininity, and female oppression.

What is the common misconception about Sylvia Plath mentioned in the script?

The script mentions a common misconception that Sylvia Plath is the patron saint of sad teenage girls, suggesting that people often judge her work based on hearsay rather than actual reading.

How does the script describe Sylvia Plath's poetry in terms of feminism?

The script describes Plath's poetry as having feminist undertones, often writing about the plight of women before women's rights were mainstream, and using her work as a form of empowerment and a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.

What does the script suggest about the relationship between Plath's personal life and her poetry?

The script suggests that Plath's personal life, including her struggles with depression and her tumultuous relationship with Ted Hughes, had a profound impact on her poetry, often manifesting in themes of trauma and autobiographical elements.

What is the significance of the poem 'Cut' in the script?

The poem 'Cut' is significant as it exemplifies Plath's ability to take a mundane experience and transform it into something more profound through her use of metaphor and simile, making the reader relate to and visualize the experience in a new way.

How does the script characterize Sylvia Plath's biography?

The script characterizes Sylvia Plath's biography as marked by early success and publication, personal tragedy with the death of her father, struggles with mental health, a brief marriage to Ted Hughes, and her untimely death by suicide.

What is the script's stance on the romanticization of suicide?

The script is critical of the romanticization of suicide, emphasizing that it is a permanent response to a temporary problem and a tragedy that is preventable. It also stresses the importance of recognizing that people can and do survive depression.

Why did Plath win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize according to the script?

Sylvia Plath won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book 'The Collected Poems,' which was published in 1981, highlighting her significant contribution to literature despite her untimely death.

What is the script's interpretation of the poem 'Lady Lazarus'?

The script interprets 'Lady Lazarus' as a brutal, angry, and morbid poem that also embodies empowerment and a peculiar form of hope. It uses repetition, rhyme, and line breaks to confront difficult themes and draw the reader into the narrative.

How does the script discuss the 'Confessional School of Poetry' in relation to Plath?

The script discusses the 'Confessional School of Poetry' as a form of poetry that deals directly with trauma and relationships, often autobiographical. It positions Plath as a member of this school, noting that her work wasn't just about capturing her emotions but also about remaking her self.

What does the script suggest about the reception of Sylvia Plath's work among teenagers?

The script suggests that Sylvia Plath's work resonates with teenagers, but it also implies that this resonance is sometimes viewed negatively or unfairly, as her work is seen as romanticizing death and self-injury.

Outlines

00:00

📚 Introduction to Sylvia Plath's Poetry

The paragraph introduces Sylvia Plath as a feminist poet who wrote about women's struggles before it was a mainstream concept. It discusses her use of metaphor and simile to make everyday experiences significant. The script also highlights Plath's biography, including her early life, education, and the inspiration behind her novel 'The Bell Jar.' It touches on her personal life, including her marriage to Ted Hughes and her eventual suicide after discovering his infidelity. The paragraph concludes with an open letter to suicide, emphasizing the tragedy and preventability of such acts, and the loss to literature that Plath's death represents.

05:05

🎭 The Power and Impact of Sylvia Plath's Ariel

This section delves into the collection of poems titled 'Ariel,' which Plath wrote in a creative burst before her death. It discusses the unique style of 'Ariel,' characterized by a shift in traditional feminine roles and a voice that varies from amused to strident. The paragraph includes excerpts from the famous poem 'Lady Lazarus,' which is both brutal and empowering, using repetition and rhyme to confront difficult themes. The discussion also covers Plath's writing style, including her use of line breaks and the emotional authenticity in her work. The influence of other writers on Plath is mentioned, as well as her place in the 'Confessional School of Poetry,' which focuses on personal trauma and relationships.

10:07

🌷 The Resonance of Sylvia Plath's Work

The final paragraph addresses the perception of Plath's work, particularly its resonance with teenagers, and argues against the criticism that her work romanticizes death and self-injury. It emphasizes the emotional authenticity and frankness in Plath's poetry, which contributes to its enduring appeal. The paragraph also discusses the importance of attentiveness and the difficulty of being human, as illustrated in the poem 'Tulips.' The script concludes with a call to keep our eyes open to the world, much like Plath did through her writing.

Keywords

💡Feminism

Feminism refers to a range of social, political, and cultural movements aimed at establishing and defending equal rights and opportunities for women. In the context of the video, Sylvia Plath is described as a feminist poet, writing about the experiences and challenges of women during a time when women's rights were not widely recognized. An example from the script is the quote from essayist Thomas McClanahan, who describes Plath as a 'raving avenger of womanhood and innocence,' highlighting her use of poetry to empower women.

💡Metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes an object or action in a way that isn't literally true, but helps explain an idea or make a comparison. The video discusses how Plath uses metaphor and simile to make everyday experiences significant. For instance, in her poem 'Cut,' she metaphorically describes her thumb as 'a flap like a hat' after cutting it, which vividly conveys the experience and makes it relatable.

💡Simile

A simile is a figure of speech that compares two different things using 'like' or 'as' to draw a vivid picture. In the video, simile is mentioned alongside metaphor as a literary device Plath uses to make her poetry more impactful. An example from the script does not directly quote a simile from Plath's work but implies that she uses these devices to create powerful imagery.

💡The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar is a novel by Sylvia Plath, which is semi-autobiographical and explores themes of mental illness and societal pressures. The video mentions that Plath's internship at Mademoiselle Magazine inspired the novel, and she described her experience as looking through a 'bell jar,' which distorts reality into a work of fiction. This reference illustrates how Plath drew from her personal life to create her literary works.

💡Depression

Depression is a mood disorder characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and a lack of interest or pleasure in activities. The video discusses Plath's struggle with depression and how it influenced her work. It also addresses the misconception that depression and suicide are romantic or inevitable outcomes, emphasizing that they are tragedies that are preventable.

💡Suicide

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. The video includes an open letter to suicide, where John Green addresses it as a permanent response to temporary problems and a tragedy. Plath's own suicide is discussed as a tragic end to her life, and the video stresses the importance of recognizing that depression can be overcome and that suicide is not a necessary outcome of mental illness.

💡Pulitzer Prize

The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, and online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. Sylvia Plath became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book 'The Collected Poems,' as mentioned in the video. This highlights the significant recognition and impact of her work in the literary world.

💡Ariel

Ariel is a collection of poems by Sylvia Plath, written in a creative burst before her death and published posthumously. The video describes Ariel as a collection that showcases Plath's unique voice and her exploration of themes like empowerment, death, and femininity. The title 'Ariel' is also significant as it reflects a transformation in Plath's writing style and thematic focus.

💡Lady Lazarus

Lady Lazarus is one of Plath's most famous poems, which uses the biblical story of Lazarus to explore themes of death, rebirth, and the author's own experiences with suicide attempts. The video discusses how the poem is brutal and angry but also empowering, illustrating Plath's ability to transform personal trauma into art that resonates with readers.

💡Confessional School of Poetry

The Confessional School of Poetry is a mid-20th-century movement in American poetry characterized by deeply personal, often autobiographical poems that deal with trauma and relationships. The video places Plath within this tradition, noting that her poems were not just personal expressions but also a means of remaking her self and exploring her identity as a woman and artist.

💡Tulips

Tulips is a poem by Sylvia Plath that contrasts the vibrancy and life of tulips with the sterile, quiet environment of a hospital room where she was recovering from an appendectomy. The poem, as discussed in the video, captures the difficulty and rewards of being alive, symbolizing the intrusion of life and color into a space of sickness and solitude.

Highlights

Sylvia Plath is often described as a feminist poet writing about the plight of women before women's rights were mainstream.

Thomas McClanahan described Plath's poetry as tapping into a source of power that transforms her voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.

Robert Pinsky said Plath's poems throw off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse.

Plath's poem 'Cut' turns a commonplace experience into something more through her use of metaphor and simile.

Plath's poetry is relatable and uses disorienting imagery to convey complex emotions.

Sylvia Plath's biography includes a notable early life, including the death of her father and her first poem publication at age eight.

The Bell Jar, Plath's novel, was inspired by her summer internship at Mademoiselle Magazine.

Plath's first suicide attempt in 1953 involved taking her mother's sleeping pills.

Plath met her husband, Ted Hughes, at the University of Cambridge, and they shared a mutual admiration for each other's work.

After discovering her husband's affair, Plath experienced a creative burst and wrote a book's worth of poems.

Sylvia Plath posthumously won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book The Collected Poems.

Ariel, a collection of poems written before her death, is one of Plath's best-known works.

In 'Lady Lazarus', Plath uses repetition and rhyme to confront difficult subjects and keep the reader engaged.

Plath's poetry often explores themes of death and the female experience, influenced by writers like James Joyce and Emily Dickinson.

The 'Confessional School of Poetry', which Plath is part of, deals directly with trauma and relationships in an autobiographical manner.

In 'Tulips', Plath explores the difficulty of being a person and the rewards of attentiveness, even when it's painful.

Plath's poetry resonates with teenagers and is noted for its emotional authenticity and lack of irony.

Plath's focused observation of the world is a great gift, as it helps us to keep our eyes open to our own experiences.

Transcripts

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course Literature.

And today we're going to talk about the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Ugh, I heard she's like the patron saint of sad teenage girls.

Well, me from the past, once again you're prejudging an author based on what you've

heard rather than what you've actually read. I know this, because I used to be you, and

I am keenly aware of the fact that you have not actually read Sylvia Plath.

So, let's actually read some poems before trying to convince everyone about how smart we are.

[Theme Music]

So, Sylvia Plath is often described as a feminist poet, writing about the plight of women before

women's rights were a mainstream idea. Like, essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote "At her brutal

best -- and Plath is a brutal poet -- she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic

voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence."

And you though the Hulk was the only raving avenger. No, there is also 'The Plath!'

And there is no question that Plath's feminism is extremely important to her poetry, but she also wrote

about a lot of day-to-day experiences and made them significant through her use of metaphor and simile.

Former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky said her poems "throw off images and phrases

with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open."

Like, here's part of her poem "Cut," which she wrote about cutting her thumb while cooking.

"What a thrill --- My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin, A flap like a hat,

Dead white. Then that red plush."

So, she takes a commonplace experience and turns it into something more, and that's one

of the hallmarks of a great poem. You can relate to it even though you've never considered

the particular subject in that particular way. Like, you understand how she's cut herself,

and you can picture the piece of skin like a hat or a scalp on her finger. You know what

the red plush looks like and the dead white, and you can almost feel it.

But while you can relate to it, the imagery is also sort of disorienting. I mean this

is a poem that begins "What a thrill." And I think some of us can relate to that feeling

that injury or destruction can be kind of thrilling. It's not a healthy thing; it's

not something we want to romanticize, but it is true.

So, let's talk about Sylvia Plath's biography in the 'Thought Bubble.' Plath was born in

1932 in Boston. Her father was an entomologist and wrote a book about bees, which would be

the subject of many of Plath's later poems. Her mom was a first generation American pursing

a master's in teaching when she met Plath's father. Sylvia published her first poem at

the age of eight. Her father died that same year.

She was a good student and attended Smith College and was awarded a summer internship

at Mademoiselle Magazine. The internship was the inspiration for her wonderful novel The

Bell Jar. She said she looked back at the experience as though looking through a bell

jar, which distorted it into a work of fiction.

The book tells us the tale of a woman who finds herself unable to enjoy her summer in

the city and all the perks that come with her internship. When she returns home, her

mother sees her depression and takes her to a doctor, who treats her extensively with

electric shock therapy. She continues to get worse until a benefactor pays for her to go

to a private hospital where she is treated appropriately and gets well enough to leave

the hospital and go back to school.

In real life, Plath's first suicide attempt was in 1953. She crawled underneath her house

and took her mother's sleeping pills and said later that she was "blissfully succumbed to

the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion."

But she survived at graduated from Smith and then went on to win a Fulbright scholarship

to study at the University of Cambridge where she met Ted Hughes, a poet whose work she

admired. They married a few months later and found a mutual interest in astrology and the

supernatural and a mutual admiration for each other's work.

In 1962, Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair and they separated.

Later that year, she experienced a creative burst and wrote a book's worth of poems. And then,

in February of 1963, she took her own life. She was only 30.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. Oh, it must be time for the open letter! Abe Lincoln?!

All right, an open letter to suicide. Dear Suicide, you are a permanent response to a temporary

problem, and you are a solution to nothing. I just want to say that at the outset, there

is nothing good or romantic about you, Suicide. You are a tragedy. You are also, in almost all cases, preventable.

Abe Lincoln had periods of intense, paralyzing depression throughout his life, and he became

the best president of the United States ever in history, except for Franklin Pierce. I'm

kidding, Franklin Pierce. You were the worst.

There is a correlation between depressive personalities and creativity, but people who

are suffering from paralyzing depression don't create anything.

So, it's very important to me when we talk about a writer whose life ended with suicide

that we note that people survive depression. And also that Sylvia Plath wasn't a good writer,

because she eventually committed suicide. In fact, her career was cut short and I mourn

all of the many wonderful books we might've had.

In short, Suicide, I don't like to say mean things, but you suck. Best wishes, John Green.

Okay, so Sylvia Plath became the first person to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

for her book The Collected Poems, published in 1981. But she's best known for Ariel, a collection

of poems written in something of a poetic frenzy in the months before she died, and published in 1965.

Robert Penn Warren called Ariel "a unique book, it scarcely seems a book at all, rather

a keen, cold gust of reality as though somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night."

In the introduction to Ariel, Robert Lowell says that in this book "...Plath becomes herself...everything

we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head. The voice is now cooly amused,

witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire."

So here are a couple excerpts from one of Plath's most famous poems, Lady Lazarus.

You can hear me read the whole thing here.

"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 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 Amused shout:

‘A miracle!' That knocks me out."

"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air."

The poem is brutal, and angry, and morbid. It involves a lot of corpses. But it's also

a poem of empowerment, and in a weird way, it's kind of hopeful. It's the kind of hard,

one hope that you can take with you no matter how difficult things get.

Lazarus, of course, refers to the Bible story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. She's

imagining herself as rising from the dead, because she lived through a suicide attempt.

And throughout the poem, she uses repetition and rhyme so that you can't look away from

these things that are difficult to face. Every time your mind starts to wander, there's a

rhyme that sucks you back in.

And then there are the line breaks, which are really fascinating in this poem. So, when

I was a kid, I though that you look a three or four second pause at the end of every line of poetry.

And that may be the case in many Shel Silverstein poems, but it's definitely not the case in many Sylvia Plath poems.

Now, like when proper poets read from their poetry, they read it all so slowly that they

can afford to take a full breath at the end of each line. But you should treat a line

break as some kind of punctuation, like maybe it reads as a comma. Maybe it just means there's

a stronger emphasis on the word before or after the line break.

One of the pleasures of reading poetry for me is that I kind of get to be the co-creator

of the poem by making choices about how to read it.

Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal once that she felt as though she lived two extremes:

"joyous positive and despairing negative." And we see both in her poems. Like in "Letter

in November," she gives us a glimpse of the joyous positive.

"...I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous,

I am so stupidly happy..."

And we've all felt puffed up with happiness, and she finds brilliant words to describe

the feeling just as it is, but I also think there's something else going on here.

There's a longstanding idea that women should be quiet and small, right? Like when I'm on

an airplane, men usually sit like blueergh, and God forbid if a woman takes an armrest on an plane!

Anyway, in that sense, allowing yourself to become enormous with happiness is a kind of

countercultural action. Instead of enormity being, like, 'unwomanly,' it becomes the perfect

and most wonderful thing for a woman to be.

So, Sylvia Plath was influenced by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence,

but also by Emily Dickinson. And if you watched our episode on Dickinson last year, you'll see that influence.

They both share a preoccupation with death, but they also both write from the perspective

of women who find themselves trapped by lack of opportunity.

So along poets like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath is often seen as a member of

the 'Confessional School of Poetry.' This so-called poetry of the 'I' dealt directly

with trauma and with relationships, and these poems were often autobiographical.

But vitally, they weren't just recording their emotions on paper and then just inserting

line breaks and rhymes. Confessional poetry isn't just about capturing the 'self', it's

also a kind of remaking the 'self'.

That's one of the great things about writing. And "Lady Lazarus" is actually a really good

example of this. I mean, in that poem, the narrator dies, but then is slowly reformed.

The last poem I want to talk about today is "Tulips," the poem that was included in Ariel,

although though it was written much earlier than most of the poems in the book. It was

about a hospital stay in which she was recovering from an appendectomy.

"The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

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 surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in."

For me, this idea of "two white lids that will not shut" is central to my understanding

of humanity and our ineradicable hope.

Plath is trying to give up and just lie still in the absolute white, but those two exciting

tulips are pulling her back into the world.

Everything is white and quiet and snowed-in, but those tulips, we read, are "too red...they hurt me."

This poem, for me at least, captures the difficulty of being a person, but also what's rewarding about being a person.

We are called to attentiveness even when it's painful.

I think Sylvia Plath often gets a bad rap precisely because her poetry resonates with teenagers.

And I think it's a little bit unfair. Yes, there are times when she romanticizes

death and self-injury, and I don't like it when she does that.

But there is astonishing emotional authenticity in her poems, and she manages it without irony.

And that incredible frankness in Plath's writing is what I think makes it endure. It all feels true.

Her focused observation of the world around her, the pupil that has to take everything

in, that was a great gift to us because by keeping her eyes open as long as she did,

she helped us to keep ours open. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

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