We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot’s in the door.

Your Poetry Is Great….How Surprising! February 27, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackback

Last night I read the foreword to the 1965 version of Ariel (Hughes’ version) by fellow confessionalist poet Robert Lowell. I was totally shocked that in this barely three page document Lowell manages to insult and discredit Plath a vast majority of the time. Of course his insults are under the guise of compliments but they are weak pseudo-compliments that strip her of her title “poet”. I can see how he could have had the misogynistic notion that he was honoring her memory but the way every sentence is worded implies that she had zero command over her poetry and she was really more like a witch with spells that created the poems rather than a skilled poet. For instance in the first few lines he writes, “Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created-hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another “poetess,” but one of those super real, hypnotic, great classical heroines” (vii).
Then, he goes on to guess about the overall conciet of the volume and in a desperate attempt to tie it to her suicide writes, “This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it” (viii). (AHHHH that quote made me really mad)
Then, he ends the foward with a lengthy paragraph in which he describes their brief encounters (she casually attended his poetry seminar at Boston University), complete with a detailed description of how she looked: “She was willowy, long-waisted, sharp-el-bowed, nervous, giggly, gracious- a brilliant tense presence embarrassed by restraint” (ix). Finally, he ends with a casual sentence about how he was totally shocked by her sucess…..how nice.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising because it seems as though Lowell really hardly knew Plath, so what’s he going to say on her behalf, but at the same time I was expecting a tribute of sorts or at least some aknowledgement of her honest-to-goodness, hard-fought, deeply earned poetic skill! Another reason why this bugs me so much is that it is just another totally uninspired, uncomplimentary foreward to a mounting collection of poorly delivered forewards in Plath’s volumes (ie: Frieda Hughes in the restored edition….read a previous blog entry). Everyone has an agenda, and that agenda is never “oh wow this is a totally amazing collection of poems….let’s celebrate it because that Sylvia Plath is/was one amazing poet!”. It’s just so weird that when someone famous dies everyone rallies around to claim a relationship with that person and yet at the same time they all justify their ignorance.
I don’t know why I expected more from Robert Lowell but I did. His foreward seemed far too reminiscent of the letters exchanged between Charlotte Bronte and Southey (see Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte). It seems like another established male poet not wanting to over-gratify the aspiring ego of the female writer, simply because she’s female, only in this case it is an even more confusing stance because the writer in question is dead, so why not compliment her?

I dunno, this strange “alterior-motive/hidden agenda” motif in Plath’s forewards seems like something to pursue…