Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...
Thanks, Peter, for pointing us towards this review.
ReplyDeleteI love Ted Hughes' letters. Bere is quite right to describe some of them as batty, but even those ones are very interesting.
Thank you, Peter, for this wonderful review. The writer really "gets" what a great collection of letters this is. I just can't praise it highly enough. If you pick it up and start reading anywhere, it's impossible to put it down, Hughes' witing is so compelling, regardless of what he's talking about.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was most impressed by, what I found most fascinating, was how, when he speak of Sylvia the poet, even when criticizing her, his tone is one invariably one of admiration. Here is a short passage from a letter to Aurelia:
"...Sylvia was not a poet of the Lowell/Sexton self-therapy, or even national therapy, school, but was a mystical poet of an altogether higher--in fact of the very highest--tradition. ...There is simply nobody like her. I've just finished reading all of Emily Dickinson for a small selection, and my final feeling is that she comes quite a way behind Sylvia. As for Lowell etc, if he is a fine doctor, she is a miracle healer. There is no comparison."
Of course, at times he is quite obviously telling the recipient what he/she wants to hear. For example, when writing to Robert Lowell, trying to distinguish Sylvia's poetry from the Lowell/Sexton school without unduly disparaging Lowell's work, he writes:
"I was trying to defins Sylvia's poetry as something that moves in spirit or in the dimension of spirit rather, and to distinguish it in this way from yours and Anne Sexton's which seem to me to share at least this, that they move in the dimension of nature and society....my own preferences lie with poetry that moves-- like Shakespeare and Tolstoy after all-- in the dimension of nature and society. And it is the other kind of poetry which I feel needs the defence..."
--Jim Long