Mad Scribbling Women

2007-04-25T18:24:00.000-06:00

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is perhaps the best-known female poet of the 20th Century. At times, the shock value of her poetry, as well as her tragic death, can overshadow her skill as a poet. Plath is especially known for her inventive metaphors. In "The Colossus," she refers to her father as an enormous, stone idol. She describes herself as "crawling like an ant in mourning/Over the weedy acres of our brow/To mend the immense skull-plates and clear/The bald, white tumuli of your eyes."

Plath moved from the highly-formal verse of the New Critics to the simpler and more open forms that characterize her later verse. She uses repeated rhymes and alliteration to give her later poetry the rhythm of nursery rhymes. This creates a sharp contrast between the form and content of her poetry. Plath often uses harsh-sounding, Anglo-Saxon words that create a jarring, curse-like effect. She also strings together accented, single-syllable words to add power to such closing lines as:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air. ("Lady Lazarus")

From her arrival on the poetry scene to this day, Plath has been raised up as a banner for feminists, angst-ridden teens, and amateur poets. Her personal struggle with depression, suicide, and feelings of victimization offer widespread appeal. However, in her poetry, Plath consistently isolates herself even from those who might commiserate with her. In "Lady Lazarus," she speaks disdainfully of the "peanut-crunching crowd" that is so interested in the sensation of her suicidal nature. It seems that even in bearing her soul, Plath cannot gain any level of community. Her poetry ends up as the equivalent of a "big strip tease" for the masses.

Young poets might take the content of Plath's poetry as a sign that pain is what creates great poetry. Personal suffering has been the subject of incredibly powerful poems; however, shock and psychosis aren't the only ingredients for memorable poetry. Sylvia Plath continues to be an important figure in American poetry because of her poetic skill. Her carefully-sculpted poems reveal her talent as a poet, which was exercised in spite of her daily battles with desperation and terror.

Sylvia Plath was a mother of two and the wife of Ted Hughes, a prestigious, English poet. Hughes left Plath in 1962. She attempted to commit suicide for the third time in 1963. Sadly, she succeeded. In 1982, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath received the Pulitzer Prize. Plath was the first poet to receive the prize posthumously.

Biography and Photos
More Poems by Plath
A Wealth of Essays on Plath
The 2003 Film Sylvia

Photo Courtesy: Madison Public Library
Information: Academy of American Poets

2007-04-23T13:01:00.000-06:00

May Swenson (1913-1989), much like Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, was known by her sense of detail. She was fascinated by alliteration, internal rhyme, and the way her poems appeared on the page.

She is perhaps best known for her typographical poems, like "Unconscious Came a Beauty." This poem never mentions the word 'butterfly,' but reveals the answer to the riddle with the shape of the words on the page.

Swenson's tone is one of emotional detachedment and optimistic. She approaches weighty topics with a confidence and playfulness. The fear of losing one's body to death in her poem "Question" ends, not with terror, but with a gently whimsical and self-conscious view of the disembodied soul. After saying that her soul will "lie in the sky/without roof or door/and with wind for an eye," she playfully wonders "how [she] will hide" when the clouds shift.

Swenson's comfortable view of potentially terrifying subjects can also be seen in her poem "Last Day." In this poem, the poet is seen sunbathing on the last day of the year. She lays in a rectangle of light that is "the length of a coffin." She describes the moment as having an"Uncomplicated Peace." Swenson lets the reader rest in an image of warm sublimity and contentment in the face of death.

Swenson was a manuscript reader and visiting professor. She won the MacArthur Fellowship and continued to write poetry until she died at the age of 76.

Swenson Reads "That the Soul May Wax Plump "
More Poems by Swenson
Visit the Utah State University May Swenson Website

Information: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition

Photograph Courtesy of Washington University Library

2007-04-23T11:24:00.003-06:00

Released in 2003, Focus Films' film, Sylvia, stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes.

The film begins with Sylvia and Ted's first encounter in 1956 and ends with Sylvia's suicide in 1963. A more appropriate name for the film might have been "Sylvia and Ted." Although the movie refers back to her past, the bulk of the film depicts her and Ted's troubled relationship due to his infidelity and her mental illness. Her poetic success takes a back seat in the film to her jealous outbursts and continuous melancholy.

The Plath depicted in the film seems to lack the energy and power evident in her poetry. One cannot picture this version of Plath "eat[ing] men like air." You're more likely to find her mulling about in utter passivity and depression. The film's portrayal of her life after her marriage to Ted Hughes implies that her suicide was a result of her adulterous husband. This demonization of Hughes might be believable if it weren't for Plath's previous suicide attempts.

Plath is shown writing on her typewriter, and her poetry is read aloud for the audience to experience. However, it is obvious that her marriage and suicide are the reasons for the film industries' interest in her life. The film begins with lines from Plath's poem, "Lady Lazarus": "Dying is an art like everything else./I do it exceptionally well." This line sets up Plath's suicide as the main achievement of her life.

Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, protested the film and limited the amount of her mother's poetry allowed in the film. In Hughes' poem, "My Mother," she berates the film industry for profiting off her mother's suicide. A few of the 46 lines of her protest poem reads:

"They think I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll."

Although Plath's failed marriage and suicide are undeniably necessary to any film adaptation of her life, this film portrayal of the poet hurries to the sensation of her tragic death without due treatment of her poetic genius. Plath comes off looking like another sad and jealous housewife. In the film, the only thing that differentiates her from any other depressed female is her romanticized death.

Interview with the Director
Photo Courtesy of Official Site

Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina"

2007-04-23T11:24:00.001-06:00

"Sestina" is one of Elizabeth's Bishop's few autobiographical poems.When Bishop's father died, her mother had to be institutionalized for a mental break down. Bishop moved to Canada and was cared for by her maternal grandmother. This poem, as well as "In the Waiting Room" and "First Death in Nova Scotia," are reflective of her experiences while with her grandmother.

"Sestina" opens with the image of the "old grandmother" who "sits in the kitchen with the child." The grandmother seems to be privy to some impending doom fore casted by both her experience and the almanac. We are told that, once hung on its string, the almanac "hovers half open above the child/hovers above the old grandmother/and her teacup full of dark brown tears" (20-23). Meanwhile, the child is drawing a "rigid house/and puts in a man with buttons like tears"(28-29).

At the start of the poem, the grandmother is telling jokes and laughing "to hide her tears"(6). This is the first instance where Bishops uses the word 'tears.' It is located at the end of a stanza, which otherwise offers a calm and cheery fireside scene until its closing line.

The grandmother and the child are given a equal voice in the poem. The grandmother knows sorrow and looks on as the young child is sketching out her future sadness in the form of a man. Some critics have drawn connections between the sadness in the house and the mysterious man as being related to her father's death. Instead of mourning, the grandmother tries to hide her tears and the child draws a "rigid house" with a "flower bed" "carefully placed in the front of the house" (34-35). The outward appearance of happiness, as the image related in the first 5 lines of the poem, is depreciated by its insincerity.

The marvelous nature of the sestina is its ability to draw associations without using conventional rhyme or alliteration. The subtle method of the sestina gives the impression that the world is interconnected. Each line of Bishop's poem must end with one of the six words: house, grandmother, child, stove, almanac, tears. Obviously, Bishop knew that these words had be chosen carefully in order to be both malleable and meaningful in the poem. Her repetition of ending words creates a sense of foreboding. The reader knows that the word 'tears' will appear in every stanza.

The words Bishop chose show both the domesticity and foreboding of the scene. The words 'house,' 'almanac,' and 'stove' become more than the objects they identify. The stove becomes a distraction for the grandmother - a call back to the simple domestic. The almanac is the reminder that the fates never rest. It dictates more than the farmers' crops. The great truth the almanac tells is "only know to the grandmother." It tells her that it is "Time to plant tears."

The 'house' seems to be growing more and more rigid by the end of the poem. Bishop's efforts as a poet writing in this rigid form is also a part of this poem. It ends with the image of the "child draw [ing] another inscrutable house," which keeps with Bishop's self-effacing view of her poetic skill.

2007-04-23T11:18:00.001-06:00

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was a student of Robert Lowell and a close friend to Sylvia Plath. She was counseled to begin writing poetry after an onset of depression following her second daughter's birth.

Sexton was a member of the "confessional school" of poetry. Her poetry was meant to be intimate and serve as "a shock to the senses" as she put it in an interview with the Hudson Review. She believed that reading poetry "should almost hurt." Later in her poetic career, she referred to herself as a sort of Imagist poet. This tendency can be seen in her later poem "The Room of My Life."

Her poetry often addresses taboo subjects. She addresses incestuous desire in the poem "The Death of Fathers." Suicide is the subject of the poem "The Starry Night," in which she describes her longing to be "sucked up" by the "rushing beast of the night" like a "drowned woman in the hot sky."

Sexton used her struggle with mental illness as fodder for poetry. Her first book of poems, To Bedlam and Partway Back, draws from her experiences during her mental breakdown, as well as her fears of her only partial recovery. Sexton won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and taught at Boston University. Regretfully, she committed suicide at the age of 45.

Sexton Reading Her Poetry
Her Poetic Career
An Interview with Anne
A Video of Sexton Reading

Photo Courtesy: University of California Santa Barbara

Information: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition

2007-04-16T08:29:00.000-06:00

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) is known as a poet's poet. She is acclaimed for her extraordinary care with words. The precision of her vocabulary, her dependence upon the visual, and her sense of the uncanny makes Bishop an engaging poet to read.

Bishop wrote in traditional and free verse forms. Often, her choice of poetic form is an extension of the poem's theme. The speaker in her villanelle "One Art" tries to convey her mastery of the art of losing. The speaker maintains the poetic form even while her confidence is deteriorating. "Sestina" is another example of Bishop's mastery of traditional form.

Elizabeth Bishop had a close, literary relationship with Robert Lowell. Her poem "The Armadillo" is dedicated to him. It can be read as a companion poem to Lowell's "Skunk Hour."

More on Bishop's Life
An Interview with the Poet
Bishop Reads "The Armadillo"
Literary Criticism of "One Art"

Photograph: Courtesy of Harvard Square Library
Information: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition

2007-03-27T19:32:00.000-06:00

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961) is perhaps best known for her connection with the Imagist movement of the early 20th century.

The Imagist circle of which HD was a member included poets such as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. These poets were characterized by a distaste for the sentimental poetry of the Victorian Era. They championed precise, economical use of language and imagery.

Excluding Williams, the Imagists preferred traditionally European images and drew upon classical literature. HD was influenced by the rediscovered works of the ancient Greek poetess, Sappho.

One of HD's most acclaimed works is the epic poem Helen in Egypt, which was published posthumously in 1961.

More Poetry by HD
More on Hilda's Life
HD reads "Helen in Egypt"
Literary Criticism on Sea Garden, HD's first volume of poetry

Picture Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.
Information: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition.

2007-02-14T15:56:00.000-06:00

Gwendolyn Brooks' (1917 - 2000) poetry depicts the many facets of the African American, urban experience.

Poems like "Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat" and "The Bean Eaters" portray discrimination and poverty. In "The Blackstone Rangers," and "The Boy Died in My Alley," Brooks reveals the threatening nature of racial strife in the inner city.

In 1950, Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book of poems titled Annie Allen. She was the first African American writer to receive that honor.

Her verses are characterized by compression and use of common vernacular. "We Real Cool" is perhaps her most popular poem.

Read Gwendolyn’s Poetry
More on Her Life
An Interview with the Poet

Photograph: Gwendolyn Brooks with Langston Hughes. Courtesy Chicago Public Library.
Information: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition.