PLATH: AO5 Flashcards
Intertextuality:
Stephen AXELROD
- Full Fathom Five
- Ariel
AO3+5
“The poems highlight their intertextual swerves and echoes”
- eg.
-> Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in “Full Fathom Five”/”Ariel” (Poem + collection - even in terms of the voice)
-> Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” in “Crossing the Water”
-> Nursery rhymes in “Daddy” and “Nick and the Candlestick”
-> The “swerves” between high and low poetic diction (poeticism and slang)
Uncanny + Defamiliarisation
BENNETT and ROYALE
- The Bee Meeting
- Daddy
- Nick and the Candlestick
- Tulips
- The Stones
- You’re
“The uncanny is not just a matter of the weird or spooky, but has to do more specifically with a disturbance of the familiar”
- eg. KAMEL on “The Bee Meeting”: “The menacing animation of inanimate objects”
-> FORD: “The most distinctive feature of ‘The Bee Meeting’ is its gothic tone”
+ TH: “The Scream”
Divided Self
Judith KROLL vs. David HOLBROOK
- Edge
- Ariel
AO3+5
KROLL:
* Plath draws on folklore, psychology and myth to “create a personal system of poetic symbols based on mythical archetypes”
-> Inspired by Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”
- He relates various folk tales, eg. the Ugandan Buganda people, with the belief “that every person is born with a double”
- A FALSE (the exterior body) and TRUE self, which must be freed (death).
* “Ariel”:
- Olga DERMOTT: “She envisages herself being gradually free from her own body”
- Leonard SANAZARO: Ariel “dramatically illustrates the individual’s urgent drive towards liberation and self-definition”
HOLBROOK:
* Plath’s poetry is entirely biographical and confessional, as there are “certain poems…which distort reality and follow such a sick logic that they must be declared pathological”
- See ‘confessional poetry’ + ‘Daddy’
Advertising
Marsha BRYANT
- An Appearance
AO3+5
- Ads in the 1950s constructed “drama through inflated rhetoric and outrageous claims [and] transformed domestic space into a dreamscape of daily miracles”
- YET! Betty FRIEDAN: Life for women in the 50s/60s = a “comfortable concentration camp”
-> Physically luxurious, mentally oppressive and impoverished
-> BRYANT: A 50s ad “presents a kitchen appliance as an ideal…wife” - woman is replaced/becomes obsolete
Confessional Poetry:
Plath:
1. UROFF on ROSENTHAL
* Daddy
* Tulips
Hughes:
2. Sheila FARR
* The Jaguar
* The Thought Fox
AO3+5
1.
- He first used the term ‘confessional’ to describe Robert Lowell, who taught Plath at Bolton
- “He said [Plath] put the speaker herself at the centre of her poems in such a way as to make her psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of her civilisation”
- Hughes himself rejected this, saying Plath uses autobiographical details in her poetry in a more emblematic way than Lowell.
- Kathleen LANT: “Figurative nakedness abounds” in American poetry of the 50s/60s, yet Plath “associates her vulnerable nakedness…with the danger of violation”
2.
- “He more often played out his inner dramas in the trappings of nature or mythology”
Confessional Poetry: DADDY
- YES: Robert PHILLIPS
- NO: Elaine FEINSTEIN
- “She dramatises the war in her soul”
- It is “one of the most nakedly confessional poems ever written”
2.
- “The poem is to be read as an invention rather than a confession”
-> See KROLL, “mythical archetypes”…
- AXELROD: Plath “bless[es] the victims [of the Holocaust] through a fantasy of identification”
-> …and divided self
- Supports PHILLIPS’s argument that “‘Daddy’ is a poem of total rejection…of family and society, [leading] to that final rejection, that of the Self”
Specific Poems:
“The Bee Meeting”
1. Rebecca WARREN
2. FORD
“Daddy”:
1. Elaine FEINSTEIN
“The Bee Meeting”
1. WARREN: “The speaker is the real prey”
2. FORD: The “last metaphor [“magician’s girl”] makes passivity a performance”
“Daddy”
1. The confinement of the shoe metaphor “brilliantly evokes the stasis of depression, from which the writing of the poem is itself an escape”
