About book The Unabridged Journals Of Sylvia Plath (2000)
The Problem of Sylvia Plath, Her Poetry, and the Necessity of Her JournalsBecause of her suicide at the age of 30, many critics have labeled her either immature or hysterical--while other critics have taken it upon themselves to defend her integrity. Those who have championed her work find they do so at personal cost. Unfortunately, her personal life, and the circumstances surrounding her death have had an adverse effect on how she is read.Quite instinctively, one knows the implications that may be drawn when acknowledging a liking for her poetry. By announcing your admiration for Plath, you may find yourself under suspicion for morbidity, bad taste and even doctrinaire feminism.However, if you believe Plath is one of the more important poets of the 20th century and that she's had a lasting effect on lyric poetry, one cannot deny the import of her work. Although, beware, her work is seen through many lenses. Even admiring lenses can cloud one's judgment. Many admirers make the mistake of imagining Plath to be a Phaedra--a spurned woman, a dangerous woman, and a victim. But the speaker in her poetry is just as multidimensional as Plath was herself. Despite the fact that she wrote from the emotional realities of her life, one cannot stress enough, how important it is to separate the person from the creative result. It is because of this confusion between the two, that the Unabridged Journals bear the burden of illumination. They are a significant contribution to our understanding of Plath and Plath scholarship.The journals allow us to see Plath’s joyful, backbreaking work. They allow us to see the methodical revisions, the many thoughtful ways in which she crafted her poems. They allow us to see the seams and underpinnings necessary in the making of lasting poetry.Though Plath's sensibility is dark, and though she twists nature to her own effect, like so many other poets and fiction writers, there is something uncommon about her work and the strength and momentum that builds poem-to-poem. There is a forcefulness of the persona speaking through her work, and then too, there is her strong inclination toward wholeness and harmony; although, many only see the jaded and sardonic undercurrents.Yet, one of the most important aspects of her work, an aspect that has often been neglected, has to do with the idea of the spirit derailed from its source, and how that spirit is always trying to find its way back to the source. The speaker is constantly in flight, searching for a means of return. This is the dilemma of the soul. It is the dilemma of the artist in his or her calling, and that spiritual pull between the real world and the state of imagining which becomes, through physical and mental exertion, its own state. It is because of this that I maintain that Plath was brilliant and that she created her final poems with genius. Her final book, known as Ariel, was a swift achievement. Many of the poems written in the final months of her life were characterized by a propulsion, or forward momentum, a gallop toward an end. Like Shakespeare’s Ariel, the spirit of Plath’s work appears to be driven toward an understanding of enslavement and the necessity of freedom. The work speaks to the alchemy of person-hood and art formation. For Plath, this was a quest for liberation, and a means to end her suffering. There is a dichotomy between the mechanical and mathematical aspects of poetry and something outside reason. Plath merges form with associative lyricism until the scaffolding of her old style falls away and we are left with Ariel.To know Plath more closely, one may want to read her journals. They give the reader a glimpse into the ways she worked and into the associative powers of her mind. The journals allow the reader to separate the person from the persona. It gives a sense of the ordinary, and humanizes the writer. One sees the struggles she endured, in her daily life, as an imperfect person in the pursuit of her art. And it is "One Art," like Bishop's art, in its own way, so precisely crafted and yet as soon as it is mastered—lost. Unfortunately, some of her journals went missing or were destroyed. But the journals that remain allow a close reader to see some of her ideas before they appeared in print. They give a sense to how she may have approached her work. There is no doubt Sylvia Plath's art was a labor of love. Her euphoria and intensity in the creating of it is tangible. It is important to read the journals, and her poetry as it is appears on the page, and to remember, all art is artifice. All true artists create not just a world, but a mythology within which they exist. Although Plath's mythology may at times be off-putting due to a kind of forcefulness and rancor, it is a distinct voice full of human emotion. The world she creates is recognizable, but only as far as a dream may be recognizable. In truth, what we encounter cannot be Plath herself. Her final poetry is a brilliant invention, prepared by a writer in pursuit of her very best. It is a visionary form: a reality that seems more real, only because of its extreme divergence. Great poets trick their listeners and readers by making the art form feel more real. Perhaps this was her “call,” as Sylvia Plath said so herself. But the call of the reader is to recognize the trick and then to commend the art for brilliant illusions.
http://www.myvideo.ge/?video_id=3812080:02 Beginning theme, comforting, like her first diary entries, sounds to me like: it is, it is gonna be ok, it is, it is gonna be ok... "...I love people. Everybody. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me...I have to live my life, it's the only one I'll ever have."00:22 and the theme repeats, but a little stronger this time, more emotional, deeper bass, deeper her love for life: "...I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life"00:40, the pace slows, in her journals the first shadows, signs of depression, contemplation: "Yes there is joy, fulfillment and companionship - but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering -"01:02 tempo is rising, as her spirits, she has a nice life to look forward. College begins, dates, dreams of her perfect man. It seems...01:18 IT IS, it is gonna be ok, beginning theme comes again, symbolizes her first writing recognition. She is offered scholarships, money, she has a relationship. "...I am not ugly, not an imbecile, not poor, not crippled...I am going for hardly any money at all to one of the best colleges. I have earned $1000 by writing. Hundreds of ambitious girls would like to be in my place. They write me letters... Five years ago if I could have seen myself now, I would have said: That is all I could ever ask!"But then... 01:36... a realization dawns on her "...and there is the fallacy of existence: the idea that one would be happy forever and aye with a given situation or series of accomplishments. Why did Virginia Woolf commit suicide? Or Sara Teasdale..."Something is wrong with her too, she feels it, the dream of a happy life gets shattered, pounded again and again by strong bass piano chords all leading to November 3, 1952: "I am afraid...I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly in the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going - and I am the one who has to decide the answers to these hideous questions"1:55. Beginning theme emerges but stops, only the first notes are played, leaving the statement unconcluded. Is it gonna be ok?Is it?Is it?24 August 1953, she reaches for the bottle of pills...
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it is a chilling experience to read this. if you keep a journal of your own you probably understand how odd it is to imagine people around the world curling up with it/them. i am a self-admitted voyeur so i couldn't resist this glimpse into her mind. as always, ted had a say in what we (and more importantly, her children) would know of her:"I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)"yes, it is disappointing to know those words are forever lost. fortunately she has other ways of guiding us through the darkest portals of her mind, and i am grateful for the challenge of the journey.
—brook
A real pot-boiler! Certainly, this is a dense collection insofar as it is highly evocative of a time, a place, a woman in crisis -- her emotions, thoughts, conflicts roar off the page into a reader's heart. Anyone curious about Sylvia Plath as not only a poet, but a woman of the 50s, and perhaps as a feminist icon or a psychological study will be sorely mistaken not to delve into this collection. Plath was a phenomenal woman of the past mid-century, and such a loss to the literary world. Her journals read in such a way that one feels as if receiving insight and the very personal secrets of a close friend -- a friend celebrating the highs of life as well as the darkest depths of despair. Reading this collection, I realize that journaling is a literary form in its own right, and no matter how desperately Plath wanted to become a celebrated prose writer, it is her journal-writing as well as her poetry which made her name, and rightly so. She was an incredible writer, and a remarkable woman of the 20th Century.
—Christina Bouwens
"I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot discard your own life with objective curiosity." The quality that predominantly stands out in Sylvia Plath's writing style is that as you are reading, she becomes you and you become her. A swap of souls takes place. Your life story is voiced in her words. Your fears, apprehensions, doubts, cravings, yearnings and all such introspections that are intimate to you alone are structured into wild erratic sentences that are delivered so powerfully that it takes some time to clear your mind again. She becomes the soul sister you have just found. If there's one author who has had the same effect on me in the past, it is Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. (Seriously, what is not there in that book?) Writing is a way of expression, among other things, and Sylvia knows how to express. At first, I was a little hesitant to read this memoir as I figured it would amount to trespassing as it was published posthumously but now I am sneakily glad I did it because her writing is the friend that I needed. It comforted me with companionship. "It seems to me more than ever than I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen."She lived a life in which her work was rejected constantly. She doubted herself often, wondered if she could write a damn thing worth while, but wrote relentlessly and compulsively everyday. She criticized her own work with much anguish which is just painful to read but also, relatable. Most people believe that she is one of those authors who became popular only because of her suicide. When you search Sylvia Plath and add a space next to her name, 'poems' pop up as the first suggestion on Google and not 'death'. I consider that a testament by itself. Admittedly, I was so moved by her writing that she was my phone's wallpaper for a couple of days. I can see how this can be a treasure for those who truly love her. We receive a first hand experience of her thoughts. Some of her entries made me say 'Oh! Sylvia!' while some 'Oh Sylvia.'. There are entries that are just weather reports but even those made me submerge. Although her writing is poignant even when she was happy, it's just drop dead beautiful. Reading her thoughts on authors like Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Capote, D.H Lawrence and many others was a delightful treat. It's not often that we come across how authors who are no more felt about other authors. She uses words in block letters every now and then which suggests how strongly she must have felt while penning it down. "WHY DON'T I FEEL SHE LOVES ME? WHAT DO I EXPECT BY "LOVE" FROM HER? WHAT IS IT I DON'T GET THAT MAKES ME CRY?"Also I'd like to praise the editor as she has done a fabulous job with her research. There's an entire section of Notes at the end of the book about all the people mentioned. You don't need to be a lover of Sylvia Plath or have any previous experience to appreciate her journals. You will fall for her writing as easily as a child craves some extra candy. It breaks my heart to know that her journals ended because she took her life and not because the pages in her book ran out.. "What am I afraid of? Growing old and dying without being Somebody?If only she knew the number of her quotes that are tattooed on people's bodies in permanent ink!
—Swetha
