April 5, 2013 By Sarah Churchwell - Financial Times
Fifty years after her death, Sylvia Plath continues to captivate writers and readers. But her role as a ‘casus belli’ in the battle of the sexes has also obscured the genius of this much-mythologised poet
American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, by Carl Rollyson, St Martin’s Press, RRP£19.69/RRP$29.99, 319 pages
Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, by Andrew Wilson, Simon & Schuster, RRP£20, 448 pages
Sylvia Plath: Poems, edited by Carol Ann Duffy, Faber, RRP£14.99, 136 pages
©Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana Univer
“I have done it again,” declares Sylvia Plath in the opening line of one of her most famous poems – the tour de force that is “Lady Lazarus”. “One year in every ten I manage it.” What the speaker manages every decade is, like Lazarus, to return from the dead. Now, 50 years after this poem was composed, Lady Lazarus has done it once more, arising for a fresh generation of readers, as Plath has done regularly since her suicide helped transform her from poet to cultural phenomenon.
The last time Plath was big news was 15 years ago, when her husband Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, the collection of poems he wrote to her ghost. When Birthday Letters came out, Plath had already been dead for 35 years – five years longer than she had lived. At the time of her death, in February 1963, Plath had published some poems in The New Yorker; her first collection, The Colossus, had been very well received three years earlier. Hughes was better known, in no small part thanks to Plath’s efforts as his agent, publicist and typist. It was Plath who submitted his collection Hawk in the Rain to the New York Poetry Center’s prize in 1957; winning it kick-started Hughes’s career.
In September 1962, after six years of marriage and two children, Plath and Hughes had separated over his affair with Assia Wevill. “Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad,” Plath wrote to her mother. In two months she produced some 40 poems that would become the Ariel collection: “I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”
Full piece at Financial Times
Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, by Andrew Wilson, Simon & Schuster, RRP£20, 448 pages
Sylvia Plath: Poems, edited by Carol Ann Duffy, Faber, RRP£14.99, 136 pages
©Courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana Univer
Sylvia Plath photographed in front of Notre Dame, Paris, in 1956
The last time Plath was big news was 15 years ago, when her husband Ted Hughes published Birthday Letters, the collection of poems he wrote to her ghost. When Birthday Letters came out, Plath had already been dead for 35 years – five years longer than she had lived. At the time of her death, in February 1963, Plath had published some poems in The New Yorker; her first collection, The Colossus, had been very well received three years earlier. Hughes was better known, in no small part thanks to Plath’s efforts as his agent, publicist and typist. It was Plath who submitted his collection Hawk in the Rain to the New York Poetry Center’s prize in 1957; winning it kick-started Hughes’s career.
In September 1962, after six years of marriage and two children, Plath and Hughes had separated over his affair with Assia Wevill. “Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad,” Plath wrote to her mother. In two months she produced some 40 poems that would become the Ariel collection: “I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.”
Full piece at Financial Times
No comments:
Post a Comment