Given that I had been triggered again into examining the purpose of poetry, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath.
Even though, unlike Hughes, I do not consider Plath as great a poet as Emily Dickinson, her poems about nature, such as The Bee Meeting and The Arrival of the Bee Box resonate more positively with me, so her work is not all bad. In such poems I am not repelled by too much intense self-centred negativity, or excessive fragmentation, and there’s some music too and an intelligible narrative. The closing lines of The Arrival of the Bee Box provide a brief illustration:
They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
I suspect that these are neither her most admired nor her most well-known poems, which perhaps says something disturbing about our culture.
Back to the Darkness
However, her later darkly intense poems, as we considered last time, pose significant problems. Yes, she was in emotional pain, and to that extent deserves our compassion. However, the extreme intensity of that pain poured into her poetry and impacted strongly on others as we have seen. As she brought it into the public domain in this damaging way we are, I think, justified in trying to decide whether, first of all, that was a wise thing to do, and secondly whether that helped her create great poetry.
I have come to believe, as a result of these recent explorations, that her intense suffering was mostly of her own making, rather than inherent in the raw experience of her life: life brought some grit with it, certainly, but the massive boulder she got left with, that weighed so heavily on her shoulders, was largely the result of her escalating fabrications.
Deaths of the Poets
Perhaps she had been primed to escalate things in this way by her upbringing, as Anne Stevenson suggests in this quote from Farley and Roberts’ Deaths of Poets:[1]
You have to understand how very seriously Americans took themselves then. . . . You take yourself as an individual so seriously, you are the centre of the universe. You are brought up that way, competitively, to get to the top of the ladder, and then you discover it’s a bit dizzying up there! Then you run into personal troubles – somebody lets you down or betrays you – something you feel you can only remedy by this particular kind of vengeance against yourself.’
Nonetheless, escalate she did, for sure, and both her poetry and her life, in my view, paid a high price for that.
Her poetry may successfully express that kind of truth to personal experience, but is that enough to make a great poem? Or, does poetry have a duty to be more balanced and even to access higher and less partial truths? I think it does. I will try and explore now why I believe that to be true.
Haemorrhaging Hurt
When we read Myers speaking about what he refers to as genius[2] as ‘a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in profounder regions of his being,’ it would seem to give warrant at first glance to the kind of disorganised intensity Plath all too often displays.
However, there is an important caveat. Myers is more cautious about Blake[3] whom he regards as an example of strong imagination insufficiently controlled by supraliminal discipline: ‘throughout all the work of William Blake we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow.’
This caveat applies particularly strongly when uprush sinks into venting negativity. This is where Hatcher, as we saw earlier. sheds useful light on the matter in his discussion of Hayden[4] when he states ‘it was never Hayden’s purpose to use his poetry to bleed on his pages or to condemn others’ and quotes Gwendolyn Brooks for a useful comparison:[5]
Brooks in her review described two sorts of poets – the one who ‘mixes with mud’ and writes in the midst of feeling, ‘his wounds like faucets above his page’, and a second sort of poet who ‘is amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the power of Art’, who has a ‘reverence for the word Art’, who, in effect, is more studied, more analytical. She goes on to say that while we need both sorts, Hayden is clearly the latter.
My sense is that maybe we do need both, but perhaps they are not of equal value.
Hatcher explains one possible reason why:[6]
[The Lion] . . . distinguishes between the unconscious self, in its primitive anger and uncontrolled raw emotions, and the conscious artist who enters the cage of self to control and channel that raw emotion and insight into intelligible pattern and form.
He quotes Wilburn Williams, Jr. in support[7] in his study of Angle of Ascent:
Hayden had the capacity to ‘Objectivise his own subjectivity. His private anguish never locks him into the sterile dead-end of solipsism; it impels him outward into the world.’
A good example of this ability is to be found in The Whipping. The poem starts from a perspective that suggests the poet is simply the observer.
The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:
Then it switches briefly to the first person, and we realise the poet was the boy who had been whipped:
My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hatefulWords could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved . . .
halfway through the fifth stanza, when the whipping is over, the poem shifts back to the third-person point of view. The effect, ostensibly a violation of narrative logic, is incredibly effective, implying among other things the poet can be objective in recounting his past until the scene recalls ‘woundlike memories’ and he instantly loses that analytical perspective.
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged—
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.
Even in describing an experience with his mother that is at least as painful if not more so than Plath’s with her father, not only does he not resort to the kind of blame-drenching histrionics she uses, but is also capable of stepping into his abusive mother’s shoes to share his sense that her ‘lifelong hidings’ explain, even if they do not excuse, her brutality.
Hayden also makes reference to the Holocaust in other poems, but they are clearly are justified by the extreme trauma of his own immediate history, as Hatcher explains:[9]
he sees in the concentration camp victims the faces of his childhood playmates and in the racism of South Africa’s apartheid and the violence of the Korean War evidence that the evils he has chronicled are neither finished nor peculiarly American.
The parallels between slavery and the Holocaust are not accidental because Hitler learned from the United States. This is part of John Fitzgerald Medina’s thesis, in his thought-provoking book Faith, Physics & Psychology, where he describes how the founders of America managed to reconcile the rhetoric of their egalitarian constitution with profiting from both their virtual genocide of the Native Americans and from their practice of slavery, and how the Nazis derived part of their inspiration from this. Linking the two poetically is therefore completely valid, in this case, but not, I think, when there is no such correspondence as in Plath’s.
This section deals with possible reasons why, no matter how intensely the poet may feel something, that does not in itself, no matter how powerfully expressed it may be, justify the damage it might do or guarantee the poetry into which it is spilled will be great.
There is also another perhaps even more important consideration.
Maintaining a Balance between Light and Dark
Robert Hayden
Hatcher summarises this possibility at one point by quoting Hayden saying[10] ‘if there exists a “poetry of despair” and rejection, there is also a poetry that affirms the humane and spiritual,’ and goes on to explain that:[11]
It is appropriate, therefore, that while in over twenty poems Hayden used an image of night or darkness to represent this period [in human history], in only two is there no light, no glimmer of hope.
It is in an article he wrote for the Association of Bahá’í Studies in 1990 that Hatcher shares other useful insights on this issue. For example:[12]
Hayden is able to hint at the obstacle to this process [of realizing our essential oneness] that racism imposes, hint at the ultimate escape from the clutches of this evil, and yet refrain from becoming dogmatic, doctrinaire, or didactic. He manages to achieve this by employing symbols, by constructing a pattern of images, and by distributing the parts of this vision among many poems rather than by attempting to incorporate the entire thought into a single piece.
He isn’t blind to the darkness but manages to balance it with light:[13]
Therefore, while much of Hayden’s poetry seems focused on existential bewilderment, he also has abundant indices to a future condition in which humanity has been cleansed of prejudice and provincialism and has achieved a state of natural nobility.
For a number of reasons, among them being Hayden’s own personal groping to discover a sense of self, Hayden chose to focus more forcefully on enunciating the terror of transition than on basking in the joy of progress towards that long-awaited shore.
Nevertheless, rarely are even his most brutal poems without some hope, without an important sign or symbol of that future light shining in the darkness of our terror and despair.
In a sense he is voicing what many of us struggle to articulate:[15]
So it is that the voice in Hayden’s poetry often cries out in the midst of our collective labor, coaching our common pain, helping us enunciate our shared confusion and consternation even while pointing to the glimmer of the morning light in our present darkness. Perhaps he saw his function as artist to help us recognize how, like Arachne in his poem “Richard Hunt’s’ Arachne’,” all of us are caught in “the moment’s centrifuge of dying/ becoming,” our eyes “brimming with horrors/ of becoming,” our mouth shaping “a cry it cannot utter,”(Collected 113) and so he tries to utter it for us.
Hayden is not claiming the darkness is not terrifying at times – it’s just not all there is.
Ann Boyles, in her article in the Journal of Bahá’í Studies 1992, quotes Glaysher as being of essentially the same mind:[16]
In an article in World Order Magazine (“Re-Centering’-’ 9-17), Frederick Glaysher points out that in a world where the “center” has been lost, a world where chaos reigns and where few people see divine order, Robert Hayden’s poems seek to re-establish that center (at least in the literary world) and to give the chaos some meaning.
She concludes that[17] ‘The presence and form of both anguish and anodyne reflect the two-edged nature of the dream. One sees the same dualism elsewhere in Hayden, as in the “deathbed childbed age” (1.10) of “Words in the Mourning Time.” In this dualism Hayden consistently transcends the negative in favour of a view that strives towards hope.’
In the problematic later poems of Plath I feel there is a surfeit of anguish and an absence of anodyne, and for that reason also they forfeit the hallmark of great poetry, despite their many admirers.
My final verdict?
Her sense of identity and self was anything but positive and secure, the root I feel of the exaggerated martyrdom of her late poetry. We ended up not looking at where the truth about her life lies amongst the conflicting reports, but what is the relationship between her poetry and truth, something that has possibly fed a false image of the person. She became an icon because many women have suffered as intensely as she claims to have done, but we have to recognize nonetheless that in terms of her life her later poetry is self dramatizing and to that degree inauthentic, filled with many untrustworthy and potentially offensive hyperboles.
This caused Perloff to question the value of Plath’s poetry:[18]
Any reader can compile his own list . . . of lines that often look like first drafts of the Ariel poems, and one begins to wonder whether Sylvia Plath is really the major writer Alvarez describes, or whether she is not perhaps an extraordinarily gifted minor poet, whose lyric intensity seemed more impressive when we encountered it in the slim and rigorously selected Ariel than when we view it in the new perspective afforded by the publication of her uncollected poems.
I think I need to clarify here that I do not accept the idea of solving for the unknown, that Hayden borrowed from Auden, as the recipe for all great poetry. Poetry has other other equally valid consciousness raising potentials, one of which, for me at least, concerns expanding our compass of compassion.
So, I have to ask myself at this point, does Plath’s poetry help us do that?
My answer to that so far is ‘No.’ She seems to present her state of mind as though it is all that matters. All too often, her level of vindictive self-justification, which disproportionately denigrates others, constricts rather than expands our empathy. She tries to draw us into her toxic perspective.
As we saw in The Whipping, Hayden transcends the limitations of his own perspective, lifting his poem to a higher level of understanding, which in turn enhances our level of consciousness.
The most that Plath’s later more unbalanced poems do is shed light on the workings of a deeply disturbed sensibility. To the extent that they tempt others to join her, they are potentially dangerous: to the extent that they help some of us understand her state of mind more deeply, they are useful. But their use seems clinical rather than poetic.
Emily Dickinson’s poems provide powerful and mind-expanding examples of what even a relatively subjective approach can achieve, strongly suggesting why she is the greater poet and why intensity is not always bad. A poem of hers I flagged up in advance is a good illustration of this.
Emily Dickinson
Afterthoughts
Her sense of identity and self was anything but positive and secure, the root I feel of the exaggerated martyrdom of her late poetry. We ended up not looking at where the truth about her life lies amongst the conflicting reports, but what is the relationship between her poetry and truth, something that has possibly fed a false image of the person. She became an icon because many women have suffered as intensely as she claims to have done, but we have to recognize nonetheless that in terms of her life her later poetry is self dramatizing and to that degree inauthentic, filled with many untrustworthy and potentially offensive hyperboles.
This caused Perloff to question the value of Plath’s poetry:[18]
Any reader can compile his own list . . . of lines that often look like first drafts of the Ariel poems, and one begins to wonder whether Sylvia Plath is really the major writer Alvarez describes, or whether she is not perhaps an extraordinarily gifted minor poet, whose lyric intensity seemed more impressive when we encountered it in the slim and rigorously selected Ariel than when we view it in the new perspective afforded by the publication of her uncollected poems.
In all fairness, as a closing comment, I have to admit that, for the most part, stylistically Hayden’s poetry does not resonate with me anywhere near as strongly as Mew’s or Dickinson’s, though he was a valuable equally modernist lens through which to examine Plath’s work. I’m out of tune with most modernity, including the mysteriously popular Clarice Cliff and her gaudy pottery abstractions. I was going to say far more about Mew in this sequence but it has gone on for far too long already so will just include these links to my posts about her.
There are moments of more positive resonance in modern poetry. Revisiting MacNeice’s Autumn Journal recently reminded me of its brilliance in capturing the flow of experience in places. There was a similar flow to Mew along with a perspective resonant with Hayden’s American Journal (the echo in the titles is, I suspect, accidental). Both are acting in a way as visitors from another planet capturing our days. Both fit better with my taste, than Hayden’s supposed masterpiece The Middle Passage, even though in the opinion of Christopher Buck and Derik Smith in their article in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia it was:[19]
Arguably his greatest masterpiece, [and] required considerable research on slavery, which Hayden did at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection in Harlem during the summer of 1941.
It also proved, in their view, significantly influential: ‘Hayden’s method, which involved diving into the historical archive to bring to life a record of the past that had been marginalized and suppressed, has proven paradigmatic for many history-minded poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.’
I feel we are in desperate need of a poetry that is more accessible, capable of reaching more people in an inspiring and mind-expanding fashion. Hatcher seems to favour poems that require great effort to understand. Is there a danger, when poetry becomes too esoteric and therefore by implication elitist, it will become increasingly side-lined, comparable to when the pared back fragmentation of modernism, in my view, destroys the music as well as the meaning of a poem.
Time to stop now – my ruminations on this will continue until my dying day, I expect, but I can’t criticise Plath for endlessly spilling her subjectivity across the page and then do the same thing myself.
References:
[1]. Deaths of Poets – page 263.
[2]. Irreducible Mind – page 426.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 445.
[4]. From the Auroral Darkness – page 26.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 82).
[6]. Op. cit. – page 112).
[7]. Op. cit. – page 256).
[8]. Op. cit. – page 260.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 121).
[10]. Op. cit. – page 252.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 277.
[12]. Racial Identity and the Patterns of Consolation in the Poetry of Robert Hayden – page 40.
[13]. Op. cit. – page 42.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 43.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 46.
[16] “Angle of Ascent”, The: Process and Achievement in the Work of Robert Hayden – page 5.
[17] Op. cit. – page 14.
[18] http://marjorieperloff.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Chap-17-Perloff.pdf – page 588.
[19] Oxford Research Encyclopaedia – page 7.