SYLVIA PLATH:
confessionalist poet/mythic prophetess
by Mark Rafidi, Shoalhaven Anglican School
‘The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it.’
Sylvia Plath – Kindness
‘I have a vision of the poems I would write, but do not. When will they come?’
Sylvia Plath – Journals 20th March 1959
The reaction to Ariel in the late sixties seems to focus
on the autobiographical content of Sylvia Plath’s poetry.
Connections are made with Plath as the victim and
the perpetrator, the mother, prophetess and visionary.
Others esteem her brilliance as the artificer, and yet other
commentators cast a wary eye over her use of historical
metaphor. The term ‘confessional’ is often used by critics,
pulling together a pool of poets, like Lowell, Sexton,
Snodgrass and Plath. Whether Plath fits or resists these
categorisations is something which the reader need
answer for themselves.
On Confessionalism
Confessionalist literature made strides away from
Literary Modernism after the Second World War.
A personalised voice replaced Eliot’s argument for
‘impersonality’. This ‘I’ was both the poet and the persona
and the ‘I’ ruthlessly divulged organic autobiographical
detail. Thus a private portrait willingly became
exhibitionist fodder for the public gaze. Unwaveringly
revelatory, the poems cross into the darker recesses
of taboo, often positioning the reader as a voyeur
(Yezzi 1998:7-9). Bloom builds on the absence of a
mediating persona, connecting it the language utilised:
‘The sense of direct speech addressed to an audience is
central to confessional writing’ (1989:13). Nelson in Gill
contextualises confessionalism within the stalwartness of
the right to privacy in America during the Cold War. She
goes on to say, ‘The autobiographical and confessional
trend in America erupted simultaneously with this
ideological inflation of the value of privacy.’ Far beyond
moving the private into the public sphere, she adds
that due to what was disclosed the ‘...confessional poets
provided a counterdiscourse to the official ideology of
privacy in the Cold War.’ (2006:23)
Whether Plath can be counted amongst the confessional
poets is conjecture. It is evident that she used personal
experience as subjects in her poetry and prose. Even
several of her short stories such as The Fifteen-Dollar
Eagle and Among the Bumblebees are based on an
experience in a tattoo parlour and the loss of her father
respectively. Similarly her novel first published under
the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, The Bell Jar, is reflective
of Plath’s episodes of mental illness during her life. In
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several of the later poems from Ariel, there are also
semi-autobiographical details in poems such as Daddy
where daddy ‘...died before I had time’. Later the persona
confirms
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
Plath’s exorcism continues with her focus shifting to
another figure who is almost certainly Hughes himself:
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Similarly in Lady Lazarus Plath draws upon the personal
and fuses it with her maniacal, transcendent warning to
the patriarchy. She reconstructs the Biblical narrative
by appropriating Lazarus’ persona with her own,
culminating with phoenix imagery in the final stanza.
However she confesses details about her brushes with
death with
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
The critics seemed to be divided. Alvarez, a close
acquaintance with both Plath and Hughes avoids
typecasting Plath as a confessionalist. He remarks on
Daddy in a piece on Plath initially broadcast for the BBC:
When she first read me the poem a few days after she
wrote it, she called it a piece of ‘light verse’. It obviously
isn’t, yet equally obviously it also isn’t the racking
personal confession that a mere description or précis
of it might make it sound. (Brennan 1999:22)
For Alvarez at least there is not the tidy synopsis of
Plath’s life exhibiting itself within stanzas. In a review for
the Observer in 1965 he reiterates his stance on Plath’s
poems, this time with an eye fixed on Lady Lazarus,
‘It is too concentrated and detached and ironic for
‘confessional’ verse, with all that implies of self-indulgent
cashing-in on misfortunes...’ (Wagner 1988:56). Uroff
takes a similar stance, arguing that the poet and the
persona in Plath’s works are not synonymous beings. He
suggests that the distance in Plath’s poems as opposed
English Teachers’ Association of NSW
SYLVIA PLATH: confessionalist poet/mythic prophetess
Speaking specifically of the two poems in question, Lady
Lazarus and Daddy, there is also scrutiny cast over the
legitimacy of Plath’s appropriation of history. Nelson
sums up these concerns nicely:
Critics argued that when Plath did take an interest
in history, she collected images of the gruesome, the
violent, the damaged or the traumatic to express her
own personal misery. A misery that had ‘nothing to do
with [her]’ seemed to have been used as if it did. Most
controversially, Plath’s use of the Holocaust in Ariel
led to claims that she unethically appropriated the
historical experience of others to figure her own pain.
(2006:26)
Yezzi also advocates a wariness when indulging in Plath’s
poems in cautioning the reader ‘...to remain deeply
suspicious of the ego that would equate filial grief with
the atrocities of the Holocaust.’ (1988:29)
Plath’s Mythic Struggle
Sylvia Plath, 1960. Source: Faber Archive – www.faber.co.uk
to Lowell’s ‘...may be measured by the techniques of
parody, caricature, hyperbole...’ (1977:4) that characterise
her characters and speakers. Uroff contends that even
with poems that do contain autobiographical material,
such as Daddy and Lady Lazarus, the aforementioned
techniques ‘...serve to distance the poet and at the same
time to project onto the speaker a subversive variety of
the poet’s own strategies’ (1977:14).
Ironically, Lowell himself, the famous confessional
poet with his publication of Life Studies inhabits an
antithetical position to Alvarez and Uroff. He suggested
in his 1966 Foreword to Ariel, ‘Everything in these
poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of
feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography
of fever.’ Hughes in 1965 commented on the source of
Plath’s fever, being ‘...fully occupied with children and
housekeeping...’ led her to a miraculous output of verse
which later became the Ariel collection. Like Lowell,
Hughes makes the connection with Ariel and Plath’s
life. ‘It is her. Everything she did was just like this, and
this is just like her – but permanent.’ M. L. Rosenthal in
his piece in 1965 for the Spectator echoes Lowell and
Hughes’ inferences on Plath’s craft, ‘...her absolute, almost
demonically intense commitment by the end to the
confessional mode...’ (Wagner 1988:60).
mETAphor • Issue 2, 2010
The reception of Plath’s oeuvre Ariel in the seventies
seems to move along new paradigms. This coincided
with the publication of some posthumous works: Letters
Home in 1975, a collection of short prose and nonfictional pieces Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams in
1977 and Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, now published under
her own name in America in 1972. Plath was increasingly
viewed as a poet who enunciated mythic discourse. The
archetypal status of the selection of poems set for study
for the HSC is apparent. Kroll in Brennan indicates
something about the nature of this myth explaining that
‘...the voices, landscapes, characters, images, emblems,
and motifs which articulate a mythic drama having
something of the eternal necessity of Greek tragedy.’
(1999:42) Others narrow the specificity of the myth by
pointing to two recurring patterns in her texts and life:
namely that in some way Plath is enclosed ‘...in plaster, in
a bell jar, a cellar, or a wax house...’ and that her central
concern was one of revolt, ‘How to reactivate the myth
of a flight so white, so pure, as to be a rebirth into the
imagined liberty of childhood?’ (Gilbert and Gunbar in
Brennan 1999:54)
Certainly Plath is critical of a number of prevailing
ideologies that were prevalent in the Cold War context
and this criticism emerges in her poems:
• The critique of marriage and domesticity in The
Applicant, with the convergence of marriage with
a sales pitch and interview to an imaginary, hapless
groom.
• Filial connection between mother and newborn baby
in Morning Song as being a natural response,
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SYLVIA PLATH: confessionalist poet/mythic prophetess
• Patriarchal power and authority in Daddy, Lady
Lazarus, The Arrival of the Bee Box et al.
The intimation of flight from her ensnarement takes
different forms: the phoenix, demonic figure rising from
the ashes, the murder of an omnipresent father with a
stake in the heart, the ‘pure acetylene / Virgin’ and the
owner of the bee box. Whilst Plath employs various
metaphors, she is describing the same process – exorcism.
Plath’s cause is not her own. Many female writers
preceding her have been involved in the same mythic
struggle, with the need of some form of rebirth:
Both Jane and Charlotte Bronte got out, as I suggested,
through the mediating madness of the woman in the
attic, Jane’s enraged crazed double, who burned down the
imprisoning house and with it the confining structures
of the past. Mary Shelley, costumed as Frankenstein, got
out by creating a monster who conveniently burned down
domestic cottages and killed friends, children, the whole
complex of family relationships. Emily Dickinson, who
saw her life as ‘shaven/And fitted to a frame,’ got out be
persuading herself that ‘The soul has moments of Escape
-/When bursting all the doors -/She dances like a Bomb,
abroad.’ (Gilbert and Gunbar in Brennan 1999:55)
Plath’s partisanship within the female tradition is certainly
valid. However, the female canon has been criticised
much along the same lines as the patriarchal one for its
exclusivity. Eagleton says:
Ironically, however,
the contents of books
purporting to deal with
this extensive tradition
often display a very narrow
and homogeneous literary
production, chiefly that
of white, middle-class,
heterosexual (or presented
as heterosexual) women,
living in England and
America during the
nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. (1990:6)
There is no doubt that Plath’s vehemence is directed
against both patriarchal figures and prevailing ideologies
which favour them. The personas she attacks in Daddy
are entirely male. Similarly her caution in Lady Lazarus
is directed towards ‘Herr God, Herr Lucifer’ and the
triumphant assertion ‘And I eat men like air.’ Fittingly
in The Arrival of the Bee Box Plath’s muse is completely
70
feminine. The dangerous hive she has ordered is
matriarchal, ‘Black on black, angrily clambering.’ Not only
are the bees symbolic of fertility but the persona states ‘I
am the owner’ and ‘Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will
set them free.’ Plath’s hegemonic claims are an example
of feminine self-assertion, purporting a personal myth of
survival or rebirth.
It is difficult to pigeonhole exactly what type of poet
Plath was. The labels of confessionalist poet or invoker
of a mythic discourse certainly do not characterise her
entirely. What is assured is her poetry is punctuated by
the voice of a hurt daughter and wife, a mother, a childlike persona, an exhibitionist et al. Furthermore her
prayers have been answered in a sense; the ‘luck’ of her
longevity are realised in her words, rather than her deeds.
She says in Context from Johnny Panic and the Bible of
Dreams:
I am not worried that poems reach relatively few
people. As it is, they go surprisingly far – among
strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the
words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a
doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime.
References
Bloom, H. (1989) Modern Critical Views: Sylvia Plath,
Chelsea House Publishers, New York.
Brennan, C. (1999) Icon Critical Guides: The Poetry of
Sylvia Plath, Icon, Cambridge.
Eagleton, M. (1990) Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader,
Blackwell, Oxford.
Hughes, T. (1998) The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Anchor
Books, New York.
Nelson D. (2006) ‘Plath, History and Politics’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Sylvia, CUP, Cambridge.
Plath, ed J. Gill, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, pp. 21–35.
Plath, S. (2000) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,
Harper Perennial, New York.
Uroff, M. D. (1977) ‘Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry:
A Reconsideration’, Iowa Review, vol. 8, no. 1, 1977
pp. 104–115.
Wagner, L. W. (1988) Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage,
Routledge, London.
Yezzi, D. (1998) ‘Confessional poetry & the artifice of
honesty’, The New Criterion, vol 16.
no. 10 June pp. 14–31.
English Teachers’ Association of NSW
WORDS TO SPEAK A PAST: the multiple voices
of contemporary indigenous poetry
by Dr Lyn McCredden, Deakin University, Melbourne
Australia has been undertaking, and undergoing, a vast
cultural and social revolution over the last decades of
the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first. This
country - both a white settler, colonial nation, and one
of the oldest lands on earth - has been asked to turn to
its Indigenous inhabitants and to respond to their cries
for justice. A national journey through the processes
of reconciliation has begun, with legal and cultural
questions being asked by both Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians: Who is responsible for the past?
Who is sorry? Who belongs to the land? Where are we to
go, if there is a “we”?
There is still no unified political approach or solution to
the gross injustices being lived out by many Indigenous
people, perhaps particularly in the so-called “remote”
communities. However, at the cultural level, Indigenous
painters, poets, songwriters, novelists, playwrights,
dancers and musicians have powerfully imagined and
constructed pre- and post-colonial Australia, visions both
beautiful and terrifying. Their voices are diverse. Their
works have entered a different kind of cultural space
from that which their ancestors knew. The ancient oral
and visual cultures of the past 40,000 years have been
transformed, as Indigenous artists produce works for
global art markets, and in written forms. This essay will
address both the recent history of this transformation
of cultural spaces, but more particularly the diversity
that now exists within what was once too easily grouped
together as a single entity, “Indigenous writing”. From
Oodgeroo to Alexis Wright, from David Unaipon to Sam
Wagan Watson and Lisa Bellear, the voices of Indigenous
Australia are multiple, and electrifying.
In 1988, critic Adam Shoemaker published an important
literary critical volume, Black Words, White Page:
Aboriginal Literature 1929–1988. In this volume he
described the writing of Aboriginal Australians as
‘Australia’s Fourth World Literature’. Coming from a
Canadian background, Shoemaker made a very important
and timely intervention into Australian Literary Studies,
being one of the first critics to analyse a field of writing
which was about to confront Australian culture with
new images of itself, new narratives which it had only
begun to imagine. The early and challenging work of
radical Indigenous poets such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal,
Jack Davis, Bobbi Sykes, Kevin Gilbert, Mudrooroo
and Lionel Fogarty were explored by Shoemaker. These
writers cannot be homogenised as ‘Indigenous poets’.
They come from different peoples, lands and knowledges.
mETAphor • Issue 2, 2010
But their voices have certainly been unified in one
way: their contributions have shaken white Australian
understandings of place, land, family, and of what might
be considered ‘literary’. Poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (first
called Kath Walker) published We are Going in 1964,
and The Dawn is at Hand in 1966, and was the first
Indigenous woman poet to be published. She has been
the source of inspiration for many Indigenous poets in
Australia. For example, Victorian Indigenous man Tony
Birch, an historian and creative writing teacher at the
University of Melbourne, writes in 2006, in the moving
conclusion to his visionary poem ‘The true history of
Beruk’, set in Melbourne:
…Below the monster hulls of ships the current carries
Beruk onward and down, to where the riverbed of
the Wurundjeri awaits his return. Beruk calls into the
darkness–singing his travels until his feet meet the
floor of 100,000 lives once lived. In the beauty and
blackness of the riverbed Beruk greets his son, David.
He then greets his father, the Ngarnajet. They sing,
feet raising a rhythm of shifting earth:
we will be gone
all gone soon
we will be gone
and we will come
we will come
and be
we will be
(Birch 2006: 76.)
It’s impossible not to hear, in these poignant and defiant
lines of a twenty-first century Indigenous man, echoes of
those often-anthologised words of older poet Oodgeroo
Noonuccal, from her 1964 poem ‘We are Going’, which
closes with the lines:
We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back as the camp
fires burn low.
We are nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone
from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.’
(Noonuccal in Macquarie 665–6)
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WORDS TO SPEAK A PAST: the multiple voices of contemporary indigenous poetry
The tenor and historical stances of these two poems
are different, though linked intimately through the
poetic echoes of ‘we will be gone’, and ‘we are going’. Yet
Birch’s poem, and the world in which he wrote it, has
changed from Oodgeroo’s pre-referendum Australia.
It is understandable that before the historical 1967
referendum,1 Oodgeroo, then called Kath Walker, would
write with such a melancholy sense of the passing of
Aboriginal life. Certainly the traditional Aboriginal ways
of life were disappearing – or being desecrated – and this
is particularly what the poet is responding to in 1964. Yet
here is Birch, in 2006, both mourning the losses of the
past, but also writing a new future built on strong lines of
inheritance, from the old warriors of the colonial period,
such as Wurundjeri leader Beruk and his family, and
leading to current day Melbourne. The modern city and
the ancient Indigenous places are thus entwined.
A further line of inheritance is traceable here, too, in
Birch’s visionary dreaming through the past and into the
present. In fact, another poem by Oodgeroo, ‘Understand
Old One’, can be seen as a poetic preface to Birch’s poetry,
with its similar conjoining of past and present:
What if you came back now
To our new world, the city roaring
There on the old peaceful camping place
Of your red fires along the quiet water,
How you would wonder
At towering stone gunyas high in air
Immense, incredible;
Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars
Like things frantic in flight.
(Oodgeroo http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/show/25216Oodgeroo-Noonuccal--Kath-Walker--Understand-Old-One)
Birch’s ‘The True History of Beruk’ and Oodgeroo’s earlier
poem construct this dialogue between past and present,
a dialogue which is not simply nostalgic or, adversely,
rancorous. Through a fully-fleshed and honouring
attitude to the past, each poet offers a politically astute
1 Aboriginal people became Australian citizens in 1948, when a separate
Australian citizenship was created for the first time (before that
time all Australians, including Aborigines, were “British subjects”).
Aboriginal people from Western Australia and Queensland gained
the vote in Commonwealth territories in 1962 and 1965 respectively.
Endorsed by 90.77% of the population, the 1967 referendum was
actually a vote on a Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967,
removing the so-called race power which had given Federal
Government the power to make laws with respect to “the people of
any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is
deemed necessary to make special laws.” (Australian Constitution
Section 51 (xxvi)). The referendum also allowed the removal from the
Constitution of the phrase “In reckoning the numbers of the people of
the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth,
Aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” (Section 127).
72
measuring of change and loss but they also envision
possible futures. They are both asking, in voices which
surely must be listened to, about how post-colonial
Australia must learn to build its identity and its future not
simply on the bones of a dead culture, but on living and
inspired memories of the past and what it can speak to us
about now.
It’s strange to think that when Oodgeroo and the
Indigenous poets of the nineteen sixties and seventies
were first published, some critics could not and would not
read them as poets. One critic wrote of Aboriginal poetry
generally:
This is bad verse…jingles, cliches, laborious rhymes all
piled up, plus the incessant, unvarying thud of a single
message…This may be useful propagandist writing…It
may well be the most powerful social-protest
material so far produced in the struggle for aboriginal
advancement…but this has nothing to do with poetry.
The authentic voice of the song-man (sic) using the
English language still remains to be heard.
(Anonymous, ctd. in Shoemaker 182).
What was looked for by this critic was formal panache,
poetry which keeps the poetic and the ideological separate,
or at least makes the politics subservient to the aesthetics.
What the critic failed to hear was a new, urgent, often
unschooled language – the voices of ancient cultures
finding their way differently, alongside Western, written,
formally polished poetry canons. But if we read, and listen,
with ears open to different, orally-trained uses of language,
we begin to hear what we might describe as Aboriginal
vernacular, performative language. That is, language which
is written by and for Indigenous Australians, accessible to
them, as well as to non-Indigenous readers. Much of the
poetry of the seventies and eighties, for example, collected
in volumes such as Kevin Gilbert’s 1989 Inside Black
Australia: An Anthology of Aboriginal Poetry, is structured
equally by political urgency and oral and vernacular uses
of language. Does such language fail to reach the heights of
‘poetry’?
One answer to this question might come when we examine
the poetry of Murri man Lionel Fogarty. A songman and
leader of his people, Fogarty grew up on the Cherbourg,
Queensland mission in the nineteen fifties and sixties, a
witness to many acts of violence, and to the subjection of
his people. His brother Daniel Yock died in police custody
in 1993, at the age of eighteen. The opening of Fogarty’s
1990 poem, ‘Dulpai-Ila Ngari Kim Mo-Man’, tells the littleknown story of a massacre of Aboriginal people in colonial
Queensland, and of Moppy, a leader of the people:
Moppy, Aborigine, Gumbal Gumbal was he
Aborigines King Billy was him; lived
English Teachers’ Association of NSW
WORDS TO SPEAK A PAST: the multiple voices of contemporary indigenous poetry
loved him people
around Tampa lands.
Lowood ancient copper blacks
never alive in them town camps.
Nature shared our environments
with physical effects
men, black was aware of that bush secret.
Then interwoven, fictional settlers
came upon their homes.
Tents went up. Gunga. Mia-mia.
Burned away. Torn, blown
Taken tribal implements, damaged.
Warlike colonies half-hearted
a magnificent death
on honest young Aborigines.
Race at Kilcoy, a bloody massacre.
Peace to a flower
gave more feeding to fires
of our escaping leaders.
High-pitched wails echoed
among a reddish-brown caraboo
named the great ‘MOPPY’
Low voice, yet spoken aloud.
Ten clans, sounds confident
to your old fight
for even 1995 in future, lied Moy
boy and man will laugh mockingly.
Surprise them at morning rise
make useful every member of our tribe.
(Fogarty, in Macquarie, 1320–1321).
What can we make of this poem, with its mixture of
untranslated Aboriginal terms and names (Moppy, King
Billy, Gumbal Gumbal, Ganga, mia-mia, Moy, and the
title of the poem), together with English oral and written
patterns of language? Non-Indigenous readers like myself
are puzzled, not knowing the range of references. But
of course this is the idea of the poem: we are outsiders
being allowed to hear a different history, a different set
of events, a strange vocabulary, a tragic narrative. But
that narrative does not remain completely strange: it
challenges us to find out more, to ask questions about
the bloody massacre at Kilcoy which the poem refers to;
about the continuing cover up in 1995; about the people
and their leaders in mid-nineteenth century Queensland
– those who ‘lived/loved him people/around Tampa
lands./ Lowood ancient copper blacks.’ As readers we
are being asked to listen differently, and to acknowledge
mETAphor • Issue 2, 2010
the contemporary Indigenous listeners to the poem,
those who are being asked to remember their forebears,
those ‘Ten clans, sounds confident/to your old fight.’ We
are urged by the poem to consider this local history of
Scottish settlers and their relationship to the ten clans,
and to ask how such knowledge impinges on the present.
In another poem, ‘Farewell Reverberated Vault of
Detentions’, Fogarty writes in a different mode:
Today up home my people are
indeedly beautifully smiling
for the devil’s sweeten words are
gone
Today my people are quenching
the waters of rivers without grog
Today my people are eating delicious
rare food of long ago.
Today a fire is made round
for a dance of leisuring enjoyment
where no violence fights stirs.
Certainly my people are god given
a birthright of wise men and women
Our country is still our Motherland
Our desires ain’t dying in pitifully
in lusting over contempt and condition
Tonight my people sleep
without a tang of fear
No paralysed minds
No numbed bodies
No pierced hearts hurt
The screams of madness ends
The madly stretched endurance
are resisted with Murri faith
(Fogarty 40)
Again in an orally-inflected, written verse form, Fogarty
writes for his people, but also with a broader dream for
Aboriginal futures. Employing a kind of utopian irony,
the poem envisages a new ‘Today’, a time and place
which is ‘indeedly beautifully smiling’, a time when
‘Murri faith’ brings what is desired to fruition. Yet the
poem is not simply a utopian dream, a measuring of
impossibilities. In building its vision the poem names
all the gripping and ongoing hurts of his people, and
the ‘stretched endurance’ of minds and bodies living out
the heritage of white colonisation and failure. But it also
imagines what it might be like to find comfort, to be
released from fear, to walk into that ‘birthright of wise
men and women’. Fogarty as poet is no simple dreamer,
73