Sylvia Plath

I bought a new stack of plath books in a second hand shop, one of which is emma tennants fictionalized novel of sylvias life and death.... ughhhhhhhhh... its the WORST kind of cupboard peeking nonsense. Gachhh... Made me feel grubby.

You think that the voice in the poem is automatically autobiographical. Although many parts of her poems are from her life, don't assume from her wording that she was abused. Much of her writing is hyperbolic, or mythologized, or just plain fictional. I read it as a lyrical poem that describes her emotional state, not one that plainly dictates what happened to her in life.

Yes. As I said earlier...

I know a bloke who knows a bloke who has this on Dvd if anybody wants a copy.

Look she was insanely in love with a guy who was adored by all - he had so many damn disciples that he could do no wrong and she had to really fight for recognition - even his indiscretions were put down to his creative talent - like so many successful men - sorry to jump on the femme bandwagon but she suffered with him in more ways than one - I'm sure her jealousy probably twisted her love and her background would've sharpened it to a nice stilleto point. AND they were a celeb relationship - whatever the tabloids say I woudln't relish being in one - they're hard enough as a no mark!!!! She is a legend tho isnt she -and I think more so than him. So I guess she got even.

Fair point nn.. I was only refering to the voice of the narrator in Lady Lazarus.. and it was no way my intention to make generalisations about her life, which I know very little of anyway. To connect the voice with that of "Sylvia's" WAS a mistake, however. That's IF you were refering to my comments, I may well have gotten confused over this. However, just to keep a bit of debate going, ..if a very well informed scholar did decide to do a breakdown of how her life informed her work (and they seem to do it fairly often, don't they?) I wouldn't have a problem with it, per se. At the end of the day she is still a giant in the field of poetry ..and people, unfortunately, like making connections between her life and work.. it seems to be part of this absurd need many have.. of making the poetry more 'real', whatever that actually means (it's fundamentally quite a personal relationship, I guess.. between writer and reader, I mean. I'm not completely sure why I regularly enjoy reading a poem/piece of prose I find fascinating and then find myself HAVING A NEED to explore the life that it sprang from, for example) I think the best we can hope for is that any new Plath-Biog writer is writing their book for the right reasons.. i.e- because of something other than 1/there being a massive amount of interest in her and 2/the promise of large sums of cash. I'm a big reader of biographies (or at least have been in the past, not so much these days) and I figure if the author has come to their subject with a fresh approach/a new slant on their life and work (as the result of a very genuine interest in the persons creative output) and (perhaps more importantly) has done a real thorough job of the research then it IS still possible to keep an interesting dialogue going between writer and reader, regardless of how debatably sullied and controversial the life.. Random thought: Controversy is probably just an indication of what fascinates us most, why all manner of opinions cling to subjects of controversy, regardless of what we would like to know.. or are comfortable knowing. This might well be because these subjects relate the truth to us, in one form or another. Flash: No DVD, mate. Shame, coz this movie DOES sound interesting. Anyone seen it? [%sig%]

Is interesting, I think, that we don't feel the need to do this with Phillip Larkin, as he was a sexually repressed librarian, who wasn't such an interesting person in life. He did his living in poems. But you cut-and-paste the famous 'they fuck you up your mum and dad' into a Plath collection and wonder how much that would have been analysed and related to her life and childhood, and motherhood and so on. My point being, that this is a poem that one could imagine Plath having written, whereas you can't do the same with say, John Betjeman. as someone (I think Dylan) once said about academics "When you've got a lot of knives you've gotta cut something"

Have you read any of the many books that are in print re Plath Steven? I am pretty much obsessed with the plath - hughes relationship, and read as much as i can - the journals, as well as several biographies sit on my bookshelves. I shall be studying plath further, as my IS at uni will be on some aspect of plath. I dont think her father was quite as bad as some people would paint him - he in actuality seemed pretty harmless from what i can gather. I think sylvias depression was a cruel and twisted thing, and i agree re her innocence. Anyone that has ever read "bride and groom" cannot doubt the love hughes had for plath and vice versa. My all time favourite poem.

I agree that her father's cruel treatment of her was exaggerated. Her father was not a Nazi... etc. Critics have done a horrible thing to Ted Hughes though, accusing him for her suicide. I just don't see it that way. You're right in one sense, the abuse that she got from her father was probably something that happened during a part of his life when he was facing difficulties in his own life. But whether the poem is Lady Lazarus or Daddy or others, it reveals some kind of sexual aphixiation experience in there, a combination of the erotic and the deadly. Her imagining herself in a boot fixes this image for me. Even the poems about the dead muses, it's hauntingly lyrical, erotic even. I read Alvarez, "The Savage Gods" and here and there, I've read bits of her life. She couldn't get along with her first boyfriend after she became Miss Madamoiselle or Miss Seventeen either. All I am saying is that she suffered from a repetition compulsion of a deadly, erotic trauma, and that is expressed in both violent and sexual terms in her poems... and that her suicide was a result of her inability to deal with what had happened to her in her youth. I also believe that both her mother and father passed away before she did. I may be wrong in asserting that. It's been a long time since I've read Plath.

She also wrote a series of poems named "Ariel." Ariel is the name of the Shakespearean character who gets the punishment of being stuck in a tree for disobeying the command of Prospero in the Tempest. It implies to me that she is stuck in her roots somehow. I know, I may be fishing for empty bottles of metaphors, but I don't think Sylvia Plath's poems about her father or her relationship with her father should be taken as forms of paranoia. The mechanics of denial, hatred, silence that she describes is too real to be simply a fictionalized persona. I also think that she would never have written those poems if the problems had been resolved in real life. Perhaps she wrote them as private poems at first, but then, felt the need to print them. She is considered a "confessional" poet for this reason.

Stephen - her mother didnt pass away before Slyvia did, it was she who published Sylvia's "Letters Home"- if you get a chance, have a read of them. As for Alvarez - hrmmm, a whole different topic there I think :o)))) One can almost disappear inside a vortex of analysis, analysis which often masks and complicates a real and simple issue. There has never been anything in her journals nor any of her bio's that suggest her father was anything but a good father - if remote. Of course, one could say that her mother would surely not have published anything contrary to that, but I get the sense that this is true. Ariels Gift is a remarkable book, its the story of ted, sylvia and the Birthday Letters - if you are very interested in Plath, have a look at this too. I disagree that Plath wouldnt have written poetry that wasnt rooted in truth - poets often DO do this Look at her suggestion of his affiliation to the Nazi party - he most certainly was NOT a nazi, as you say. I think - and I am by no means an expert - that Plath's suicide was to do with having to live with the unbearable truth of Ted's affair with another woman. The love that she and Ted felt for each other was really SO intense - the fracturing of it, combined with manic depression, became something she was unable to live with, despite the huge love for her children.

I'm a Plath fanatic too, and I'm not sure I go along with much of your analysis, Steven. But that's what's wonderful about Plath: she prompts infinite debate. As I've grown older and known more people, I've realised that her life is not so remarkable after all; large numbers of people commit suicide in similar circumstances. What is remarkable and enduring is the poetry, which is a giant standing on the shoulders of her life. d.beswetherick.

But that is the point, isn't it? IF she had revealed what had happened to her in her journals, what would they have done to her during those times? In our times, she would have been removed from the home and the father incarcerated or otherwise. In the time of Sylvia Plath, they would have locked her up. I agree that her life was not very remarkable, but I don't think inifidelity would have driven her to suicide. Infidelity is quite common in literary circles... I didn't know that her mother passed away after she died, but I really think the father has been treated all too nicely. If she had to create a literary persona who was much more aggressive, much more vindictive than her normal self, it is no wonder she mixed fantasy with reality in her poems. Yes, she is remarkable as a poet for bringing things into the open that were not discussed before, writing about unpleasant feelings and experiences that others had ignored...

I disagree steven. Infidelity - whether common or not in literary circles - is certainly enough to drive a woman (or man) with manic depression to commit suicide. I think your analysis is far too simple I am afraid, and only seizes upon the simplistic view. sorry!

She made suicide attempts before she suffered infidelity. That being the case, I don't think it would be fair to blame Hughes alone. Perhaps it was the fatal combination of her suicidal tendency and his infidelity that finished her off. Was Plath partlly attracted to Hughes because he was dangerous to her? Was Hughes partly attracted to Plath because she was emotionally unstable? One of the most chilling facts about Hughes is that Ashia Wevill (sp?) was as unstable as Plath and committed suicide in a similar way to Plath after Hughes was unfaithful to her. Why did the pattern repeat? More in this than we can understand. d.beswetherick.

Longish article, but very good - Desperately seeking Sylvia Why are we still so obsessed with the life and death of Sylvia Plath, asks Katharine Viner Monday October 20, 2003 The Guardian Sylvia Plath would have been 71 next week, had she not gassed herself in her London home. She has been dead for 40 years; her children are grown up with families of their own; her daughter Frieda is now the poet. But her presence, like her absence, is everywhere. Ever since her death, people or papers have emerged with new revelations about who she was, or about Ted Hughes, the husband who left her, or about the woman for whom Ted left. Novelists fictionalise her story - both Emma Tennant and Kate Moses in the past two years. Readers, writers, experts and psychoanalysts pore over her life and her work - the writer Diane Middlebrook is to publish an eagerly awaited analysis of the Plath-Hughes marriage, Her Husband, in June next year. And now, after years of rumours (remember the ones about Molly Ringwald? Meg Ryan?), Gwyneth Paltrow is starring as Plath in a glossy film, Sylvia, which will get its UK premiere on November 6 at the London Film Festival. However did "happy girl Sivvy", a brilliant American poet who achieved little fame during her short life, become such a fixture of our imaginations? Or, to put it another way, and in the words of her daughter Frieda, why is "my buried mother... up-dug for repeat performances"? Intriguingly, Plath herself posed a similar question in her Journals; it concerned the premier celebrities of the day, and her fascination with them. "Liz Taylor is getting Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds, who appears cherubic, round-faced, wronged, in pin curls and house-robe - Mike Todd hardly cold," she wrote. "How odd these events affect one so. Why? Analogies?" Is it analogies that make Plath so affecting to us, too? Certainly, many identify with her work and what they can conclude about her life. Plath-obsessives, nearly always women, typically start their campaigns in their teens; they read Ariel, her most celebrated collection of poetry, and The Bell Jar, Plath's autobiographical novel in which the central character, Esther Greenwood, tries to kill herself and undergoes electric shock treatment - just as Plath herself nearly succeeded in her first suicide attempt in 1953. Paltrow, reading The Bell Jar for research, says she found it uncomfortably close to her own experiences. She told US Vogue: "To read that book when you're in the age frame that it was written in, it's disturbing. Because you can so quickly tap into those feelings of indefinable walls and edges and not knowing who you are." The Bell Jar is, perhaps, about all young women's struggles for self-definition - but at their most extreme and dangerous. Similarly, Plath's work contains a conflict familiar to many women: while in her journals and letters she presented herself as studious and ambitious, imbued with man-pleasing femininity, her poetry is violently female, furious, witty. She was not consistent (in her Journals she wrote, "God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?"). She confessed her rage at her father (he died when she was nine - "you died before I had time") and at her mother (in Medusa, she resentfully described her mother's "old barnacled umbilicus" connecting them forever beneath the sea). And she liked sex ("We had a very good f'ing," she wrote in her Journals. "Enormously good, perhaps the best yet."). As Elizabeth Sigmund, a friend of Plath's, says, "There are so many things in Sylvia's life which echo with young people now. A dependent mother who needs you to be happy and successful. An absent father. A woman trying to make it in a man's literary world. Working and having children at the same time." As Plath wrote in her Journals, "I want Books and Babies and Beef stews" - pretty much wanting-it-all in the 50s. More than mere analogies, however, there is a cultural obsession with Plath's relationship with Hughes, the late poet laureate who died in 1998 and with whom she had a passionate relationship - and two children - before he left her for Assia Wevill. "I would love to think that the culture's fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is," says her friend Al Alvarez, who gave her her first significant (and glowing) review. "That would be lovely. But it wouldn't be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip." We see the Plath/Hughes relationship as both madly exciting and morbidly terrifying: the passion (the first time they met, at a party, Hughes kissed Plath "bang smash on the mouth" before she took a bite out of his cheek, leaving him bleeding); the meeting of great minds (two brilliant poets in the same marriage); the Heathcliffian image of Hughes (big, gruff, moody, saturnine, a Yorkshireman himself - the courting couple even paid a visit to High Withins, setting for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Plath wrote a poem with the same title); tragedy and death (not only Sylvia's devastating suicide; Assia Wevill, apparently haunted by Plath, also killed herself, in 1969, along with their four-year- old daugher Shura). The combination is intoxicating - like a fantasy, and yet not fiction. In the 80s, Plath became a kind of feminist symbol of a victim, of what men can do to women; and the torment she endured is certainly part of the fascination for some. Not just in her life, or in her poetry, but after her death - since she was still legally married to Hughes, he inherited the Plath estate and was either careless with her work or protective of others' (and his own) feelings, depending on your view. He rearranged Plath's order of the poems in Ariel, for example, and added some of her bleakest at the end, such as Edge, which begins: "The woman is perfected./Her dead/Body wears the smile of accomplishment." Plath's order, on the other hand, was more hopeful - it began with the word "love" and ended with "spring". Hughes burned Plath's last journal, "lost" another, similarly "lost" an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers should not be released until 2013. Her friends say that the victim image foisted on to Plath in the 80s never really fitted the woman, that Hughes was madly in love with her (as his near-death publication of Birthday Letters showed), and that she and Hughes in fact had an unusually equal relationship; but that is not to deny that being a woman and a writer in the 50s was difficult. As Jacqueline Rose explains in The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, feminism has stressed the "representative nature of Plath's inner drama", and has shown that Plath's traumas focus on what the patriarchal world has done to her - her father and her husband in her own life, but patriarchy in her work too. This is in revealing contrast with the prim 50s perfect homemaker part of her, of which the first suicide attempt was such a dramatic rebuke. In all of this, we think we know Plath, can see the real woman beyond the work, because she mined so much of her life for her writing. As Middlebrook has revealed, at the time of her death she was working on what she called a "potboiler" about her romance with Ted: it was called Doubletake and was the story of "a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and a philanderer". That manuscript also disappeared after her death. And she wanted to be famous; in Middlebrook's words, "she was destined to make a 'statement' about her whole generation, simply by writing about 'that blonde girl Sylvia Plath'." In fact, her intimate relationship with us - or, more correctly, our intimate relationship with whom we think she is - is very much in the spirit of the celebrity worship of our age. Hence the charge that our Plath/Hughes fascination is just a tawdry soap opera for the chattering classes; Heat magazine for intellectuals. We project our desires on to her; we read her poems and think she knows us; we fantasise about her glamorous, doomed life. The early death, too, is key. We expect our great women writers to be doomed, and dead, and preferably mad - especially when it comes to the movies, as recent films about Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch show. But she is not 71, and will always be 30: Plath's death has fixed her most resolutely as an icon of our times. It is not just the chattering public who are endlessly fascinated by the saga, however. The Hughes family, especially Ted's sister Olwyn, has retained a vice-like grip on the Plath estate, and spent their lives trying to contain the obsession. This has had the reverse effect, feeding the mystique. Ted and Olwyn, always fascinated by the occult and supernatural, considered the Plath/Hughes relationship a murky subject for anyone to dip their toes into, believing that those who wrote about it would be cursed. There have been many feuds - from the biographers of Plath being banned from quoting a word of her poetry, to Rose being told that her book was "evil" and her speculation on Sylvia's sexual identity would in some countries be "grounds for homicide", to Frieda's fury at the film, Sylvia, being made: "I will never, never in a million years go to see it," she said this year. In fact, Frieda wrote a powerful poem about the making of the movie, My Mother, which serves as a jolting reminder of whose story this really is; about whom we're really talking when we talk of the milk Plath left out for her children on the day she committed suicide, the wet tea-towels she jammed in the joints of their doors. "Now they want to make a film/For anyone lacking the ability/To imagine the body, head in oven,/Orphaning children," she wrote. "They think/I should give them my mother's words/To fill the mouth of their monster/Their Sylvia Suicide Doll." Frieda Hughes is now 42, a talented painter and poet; she bears a striking resemblance to her mother, and has a similarly deep, moving voice. Plath's story is Frieda's story; but fame means we think it belongs to the rest of us. Her mother haunts the culture still. · Sylvia opens in the UK in January

That's a great analysis, and I take Frieda's view entirely. I don't agree that Wevill's death was about being haunted by Plath though - at least not primarily. She was a disturbed woman before Hughes met her: maybe that attracted him to her. It takes two to commit suicide. And, with respect, no matter how iconic Plath may have become to women, her work isn't just for women, and never was, in my opinion. I love it deeply; she's my favourite modern poet. That isn't to say that I pretend to fully identify with poems about childbirth and motherhood, but in my view Plath tinges even those themes strange, as she tinged everything strange. She wasn't everywoman, I know that. I'm more conscious of a particularly female sensibility in Austen, say, or Woolf, though I like them too. d.beswetherick. I used to know Liz Sigmund. A lovely woman, who died too young too.

Erk, I think I might have killed Liz Sigmund off prematurely. Apologies. She was brilliant in the Camelford water pollution incident, and before that she used be a major figure in the CND protests around here. Ruthless campaigner, yet utterly sweet in person.

Last Words. I do not want a plain box, I want a sargophagus With tigery stripes and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already - the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without their fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important. I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit! My mirror is clouding over - A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all. The flowers and faces whiten to a sheet. I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it. One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that. They stay, their little particular lustres Warmed by much handling. They almost purr. When the soles of my feet grow cold, The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me. Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots Bloom about me like night-flowers, with a good smell. They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart Under my feet in a neat parcel. I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark, And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

Or "I've married a cupboard of rubbish" "My mendings itch, there is nothing to do, I shall be as good as new" "Love set me going like a fat gold watch" All of Lady Lazarus, all of Daddy. I personally think she wrote better prose than poems and yes, sometimes her dramatic life does obscure the work, but when she flew, she really flew.

Funny you mentioned Larkin, Andrew. I had the same impression but got an email from my Dad recently.. said he'd just watched a documentary on Larkin.. and that he was a bit of a 'randy old sod' in reality. Wish I'd seen it, coz I know buggar all about his life. BUT I guess we'll never know exactly why Plath gets so much attention.. I guess one of the main reasons is coz she's not around to give her own opinions. Could it have anything to do with british culture (especially in that era) still seeing women as victims? Just a random thought. Like you say, if the writer of Plath's poems had been a man I wonder how they would have been analysed. I doubt that they would have leant so heavily on the persons family history.. as they seem to do with Plath. [%sig%]

Electra On Azalea Path The day you died I went into the dirt, Into the lightless hibernaculum Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard. It was good for twenty years, that wintering -- As if you never existed, as if I came God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly: Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity. I had nothing to do with guilt or anything When I wormed back under my mother's heart. Small as a doll in my dress of innocence I lay dreaming your epic, image by image. Nobody died or withered on that stage. Everything took place in a durable whiteness. The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill. I found your name, I found your bones and all Enlisted in a cramped necropolis your speckled stone skewed by an iron fence. In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path. A field of burdock opens to the south. Six feet of yellow gravel cover you. The artificial red sage does not stir In the basket of plastic evergreens they put At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot, Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye: The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red. Another kind of redness bothers me: The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth My mother unrolled at your last homecoming. I borrow the silts of an old tragedy. The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing; My mother dreamed you face down in the sea. The stony actors poise and pause for breath. I brought my love to bear, and then you died. It was the gangrene ate you to the bone My mother said: you died like any man. How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting at my throat. O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father -- your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. It was my love that did us both to death. Lady Lazarus I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it---- A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin 0 my enemy. Do I terrify?---- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. 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. There is a charge For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart---- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash --- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

Oh, Gos, I can hear her voice reading that last one, because she recorded it. Her poems really work out loud; that's a part of the effect.

Yes, especially when she says the lines - I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. I love the lazy, slow almost a drawl of irony, its very dramatic. Sometimes during the reading, she slips into what a friend called "the B movie voice" and slightly over dramatises - she reads almost over heavily, at times stressing each syllable in aline... but it IS very effective.

Bundle of laughs ain't she? Liked 'Last words' should it be 'the pale star-distant (not distance?) faces' like that image anyway couldn't get into the Electra poem, Lady Lazarus very powerful, and though not my cup of chicken soup (presumably Plath was Jewish?) the second and third stanzas hit my brain and gut buttons I certainly rate Plath higher than I did, having read these, so thanx to those who printed them for me- Not enough to convince me she's a great poet, but I understand a little more why many think she is

There's all sorts of articles about Plath's use of Jewish imagery, given that she is not Jewish and she gets into quite a bit of bother for it - along the lines of, can it be right for an artist to use the Holocaust as a metaphor for anything other than what it was? When I think about this, my only answer is that it seems alright to me, if done with a great deal of care, but then as a gentile I am not in as good a position to give an answer as others might be.

Interesting. I havent seen the film yet - and I'm interested to see how Assia Wevill is portrayed (if at all). I don't know why Assia, who was herself a poet of some skill, is not spoken about more. Maybe it's the horror of the event? Once is a tragedy, twice is something too terrible to contemplate? I agree that Alvarez was terrified of Plath. I think she possibly appalled and bewildered a great many people who came into contact with her. It's difficult to get a correct take on Plath - everyone who has written about their relationship with her since her death - ranging from supposed best friends to the locum postman it seems at times - has some ulterior motive it seems.

I've not read Plath since school (though I'm a big Ted Hughes fan.. am rubbing my hands with glee, waiting for the 'Collected Poems' to be delivered) and I'm a bit suspicious, like Tony. I found Liana and d.bes's chat about the readings interesting ..although I've not heard them ..Lady Lazarus, especially, has a really punchy spoken quality about it. The poems here, I enjoyed, but am still not convinced, personally. I read Lady Lazarus over a couple of times and, have to say, it IS a remarkably powerful poem.. the repetition 'I do it so it..' almost breaks you up.. because, at the back of my head, I'm thinking.. 'this is morbid.. the repetition isn't very convincing, technically, either, and yet because the voice is so forthright (and, in a way, fragile, or at least however fragile this level of self awareness can be) and is completely aware of it's own melodramatic tone, you can, in some way, forgive her for it. I know that is something of a back handed compliment but, anyway.. The voice is so concentrated, so centred (there's not much external description in the poem, really.. not in any conventional sense, she's just using these mental fantasies and metaphors it seems) ..so stark that it seems much 'truer' ..in that, if I feel slightly annoyed that bits are incoherant, repetitious or whatever.. that the condition the voice is speaking from somehow NEEDS that incoherance to feed it. In that way the poem is completely unique, and, in my book, unique goes a long way to being bloody fantastic. But it's not a 'fantastic' I'm at all comfortable with. But I'm sure that is pretty much intended! There is something terrifying in that jump from 'call' to 'cell' ..why doesn't she say 'calling'? It just seems awkward.. but brilliant at the same time. A 'calling' seems understandable.. the living, or life, still needs the Lazarus figure because they are suited/have mutual needs or something.. the dark sarcasm fits the tone of the poem.. BUT because she says 'call' it's like she's just a useless receptionist or something, waiting for a call.. it just seems vague. [%sig%]

Cheers Andrew Pack and others for putting me right on SP's 'non jewishness' - mmm mind you i've been out with a few 'mentally inventive' women in my time :-) Wow Andrew O'Donnell - some in-depth analysis there - v.impressive :-) Yep I'm a Hughes fan too - actually met the great man along with Brian Patten and DM Thomas (White hotel) at an Arvon course I was doing - aye we had some reet grand discussions- Plath's poetry make 'Crow' seem positively straightforward :-) I guess that Hughes more 'external poetry' is more typically male? may be talking rubbish here- certainly he's a poet whose images and language come across much more strongly to me than SP's - mind you they come across more strongly than most poets to be fair

I like early Hughes, but not "Crow", which I loathe.

What abt 'bride and groom' bes? my favourite poem i think... or 'lovesong' Can never decide.

Everything he writes seems fascinating to me.. everything I knew of his, for a long time, was 'Crow' ..then I read the Birthday Letters when it came out. Read 'Gaudete' when I was travelling.. and then got my hands on 'Hawk in the Rain' a few months back and it just blew me away.. couldn't believe I'd left it so long to read this.. brilliant. But I suppose I cling to 'Crow' more than anything, just coz it's so familiar. What was old Ted like then, Tony?? C'mon give us the gossip! [%sig%]

Oh Liana, read that 'Ariel's Gift' a while back. Really liked it. I thought it might be a bit gossipy and not so interesting but it always came back to the poetry. Very nice analytical book.. [%sig%]

And what about D.M.Thomas? I tried to read "The White Hotel" and found it incoherent (have I got the right author?). Good on him, though, because I've a feeling he was first published late in life, which is an encouragement to old buffers like me. As far as Crow's concerned, my sense is that it was rushed. I prefer those intensely careful poems Hughes wrote earlier. Another thing I don't like from around the time of "Crow" is "Orgast"; it seems to me that Hughes had grown too full of himself by then and thought he could do anything, forgetting that even geniuses have to put in some bloody elbow grease. I think of him as the Richard Burton of the poetry world - still craggily magnetic in his later days and capable of genius in random moments of ragged glory, but as over the hill as he was over the top. I haven't read all the later stuff, though, so I'm willing to be corrected and guided. d.beswetherick.

Yeah, there is something Richard Burtonesque about him.. I was just looking at the picture on his new Collected Poems and there's something of Burton about him in that. A cragginess! Interesting gossip Tony. I think Ted Hughes was actually doing some course near my Uni (?) in Stoke when I was there. I remember someone telling me, anyway. I didn't really believe it though. I couldn't connect the author of Crow with a living, breathing person at all! I've seen bits of (I think it was..) an Omnibus on him years ago. They filmed him in a local pub of his. He was drinking scotch and looked extremely uncomfortable being filmed. That's all I remember. [%sig%]

Andre, Ariels Gift is a great book - when you open it at any page, you get extracts of at least one of her or teds poems - usually more. Thats the difference between it and most other plath books. Bitter Fame, for example, is just that - bitter. I just bought Janet Malcom's "The Silent Woman" - I'll let you know how that one is.

Sorry andrew, i appear to have made you a frenchman. Or an australian pop star.

May wee mate. [%sig%]

Almost finished The Silent Woman - can highly recommend it. It's a book about the problems of writing biography - focussing on plath and hughes of course, but damn its good.