Abstract
The purpose of this extended essay is to challenge the effects of the life and ordeals of literary icons on their poetry, by examining the question ‘To what extent did Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath’s life of crisis affect their poetry?’ The scope of this essay encompasses two poets. The unique and exceptional poetry of Dickinson as well as the idiosyncratic journey of Plath drew me to these particular poets. This paper explores Dickinson and Plath’s life threads and their reflections through the poets’ writings.
There are parallels to be found in the essence of both poet’s lives, with both Dickinson and Plath featuring similar subjects.
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The link between the personae of the poets and their written expressions leaves other doorways open to exploration. How did the cultivation of crises in both poets’ lives come to be? In what manner where these crises reflected through their poetry? Through what did these icons influence or reshape American poetry?
Introduction
Dickinson lived a reclusive life. She was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts (where she lived her whole life) to a prominent family. She attended Amherst Academy from 1840-1847. By the 1860s, Dickinson lived in almost total isolation from everyone except her family along a few visitors. But given her extensive reading and frequent correspondence with a wide circle of friends, she was far from cut off intellectually. Her social contact was with her immediate and extended family. The small number of people whom she did meet were a huge influence on her poetry. Dickinson published few than a dozen poems in her lifetime. In fact, no one knew that she'd been nearly so prolific until her sister discovered more than 1800 poems after Emily's death in 1886. Both siblings were important to Dickinson emotionally and intellectually. (http://www.edickinson.org/, n.d.)
Plath was born in Boston in 1932. Her father was an entomologist and wrote a book about bees, which are the subject of many of Plath's later poems. Her mom was a first generation American pursing a master's in teaching when she met Plath's father. Sylvia published her first poem at the age of eight. Her father died that same year. She was a good student and attended Smith College and was awarded a summer internship at Mademoiselle Magazine. The internship was the inspiration for her wonderful novel The Bell Jar. The novel follows its heroine, Esther, as she slides into a severe depressive episode. It is tale of a woman who finds herself unable to enjoy her summer in the city and all the perks that come with her internship. When she returns home, her mother sees her depression and takes her to a doctor, who treats her extensively with electric shock therapy. She continues to get worse until a benefactor pays for her to go to a private hospital where she is treated appropriately and gets well enough to leave the hospital and go back to school. But she survived at graduated from Smith and then went on to win a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge where she met Ted Hughes, a poet whose work she admired. They married a few months later and found a mutual interest in astrology and the supernatural and a mutual admiration for each other's work. In 1962, Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair and they separated. Later that year, she experienced a creative burst and wrote a book's worth of poems. And then, in February of 1963, she took her own life. She was only 30. Sylvia Plath became the first person to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book The Collected Poems, published in 1981. (The Poetry Foundation, n.d.)
Feminism
The idea of patriarchal dominance can be shown in Dickinson’s following poem (htt1):
They shut me up in Prose –
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
During Dickinson’s time it was considered that poetry requires a person to have a high level of intellect which women lacked. And therefore, women could only write prose while poetry was reserved for men. In this rebellious poem by Dickinson, “They” refers to the patriarchal society that impedes women and likes them to be “still” or passive.
Title divine—is mine!
The Wife—without the Sign!
Acute Degree—conferred on me—
Empress of Calvary!
Royal—all but the Crown!
Betrothed—without the swoon
God sends us Women—
When you—hold—Garnet to Garnet—
Gold—to Gold—
Born—Bridalled—Shrouded—
In a Day—
Tri Victory
'My Husband'—women say—
Stroking the Melody—
Is this—the way?
In “Title divine —is mine!” (htt2), Dickinson sarcastically reveals how the “wife” title is given like a crown but this wife’s duties remain anything but regal. By likening women to Jesus Christ, she establishes that women are crucified in the institution of marriage. It also shows how marriage concludes a “Tri victory” for the patriarchal society. In the end, the poet challenges those women and asks them if that is what they want (“Is this—the way?”). It is then illustrated how Emily Dickinson challenged the realities of women in patriarchal societies and provided an inspiring female voice that opposed the doctrines of marriage and patriarchy. But she excusable contradicts herself when she also submits, like her siblings, to her father’s will. She asks him for his permission when she wants to write late at night, also noting that no husband would have granted such permission.
In a time dominated by men, a lot of Sylvia Plath’s poetry revolved around her struggle to find her voice, with suggestions of female oppression. In “Mushrooms”, Plath likens the mushrooms to a repressed group:
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room…
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!...
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
This metaphor compares mushrooms to women as they begin to “Acquire the air”, it also foreshadows a women’s rights movement or an uprising of women (“We shall by morning…Inherit the earth”). Plath is therefore described as a feminist poet, writing about the plight of women before the idea of feminism and women’s rights was mainstream. Essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote: 'At her brutal best -- and Plath is a brutal poet -- she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.'
Domestic Dissatisfaction and Family Relations.
Evident in Dickinson’s letter correspondence is her strained relationship with her family.
“I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.” Dickinson couldn’t seek support from her family in her literary efforts as none of them saw her as a literary genius. Her father, for example, only saw her brother Austin as a genius and didn’t look beyond.
But Dickinson was a caretaker till the end. She cared for her mother for the final seven years of her life, until her mother died on November 14, 1882. In a letter to Mrs. J.C. Holland, she wrote: 'The dear Mother that could not walk, has flown. It never occurred to us that she had not Limbs, she had Wings--and she soared from us unexpectedly as a summoned Bird--' Dickinson could not understand what it meant: the death of her mother. She had experienced so much death in her life, not only with the deaths of friends and acquaintances, but the death of her father, and now her mother.
Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.
In this poem, Emily compares the pangs of grief, which never quite subside, with the tidal pull of the moon on a cloudy night.
Sylvia Plath’s complex relationship with her father is portrayed in her poem, “Daddy”:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time–
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
This is a vivid illustration of anguish, brutality and a crying out of the soul from a daughter who lost her father. The poet begins with he “does not do anymore” referring to the fact that she feels like she has been a foot who has been living in a black shoe for the last thirty or so years. She refers to him as “Daddy” and insists that she needed to kill him, but he passed away before she could.
Imagery and Symbolism
A very real aspect of the most transcendent of poetry is the elegant use of symbolism in a way that connects or inspires the reader.
The Lightning is a yellow Fork
From Tables in the sky
By inadvertent fingers dropt
The awful Cutlery
Of mansions never quite disclosed
And never quite concealed
The Apparatus of the Dark
To ignorance revealed.
Dickinson often remains mysteriously teasing (htt3). And one reason for this is that her metaphors, here likening the lightning to a ‘fork’, hovers uneasily between metaphor and a literal comparison. And this is where Dickinson’s real subject might be discovered – language. The excitement of the comparison of the prongs of a form with the dazzling prongs of light of lightning comes back to life. And the fingers, in line three, further strengthen the visual images – fingers rather like the ‘prongs’ of a fork, or lightning. The strangeness of language is also forcefully impressed on the reader.
She uses symbolism to pose a question to the reader without explicitly asking one. This poem closely resembles the poems of the Imagists, as she makes a short description of a lighting strike. However, the description becomes only half the poem, as she goes deep into metaphor and abstract ideas.
Imagery used inside of Dickinson’s poems create a bigger picture in the readers’ minds that let them almost feel some of the words talking to them. Whereas symbolism in her poetry work shows how an object or piece inside the poem can represent a meaning behind it. Both of which the symbolism and imagery that Dickinson uses in her poems creates the overall effects that she as a writer is looking to achieve. Dickinson’s poetry develops her reader’s minds by using the two primary sources such as imagery and symbolism that are being imaged by the reader, the overall meanings behind her poetry, and the symbolic representation in her work.
“From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked…but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
In this passage from Sylvia Plath’s 'The Bell Jar,' a young woman imagines an uncertain future– and speaks to the universal fear of becoming paralyzed by the prospect of making the wrong choice. Under Plath’s shrewd eye and pen, everyday objects became haunting images: a “new statue in a drafty museum,” a shadow in a mirror, a slab of soap. In her first collection of poems, 'The Colossus,' she wrote of a feeling of nothingness: 'white: it is a complexion of the mind.” At the same time, she found solace in nature, from “a blue mist” “dragging the lake,” to white flowers that “tower and topple,” to blue mussels “clumped like bulbs.”
'Ariel' is also filled with foreboding imagery, such as “a child's cry” that “melts in the wall” and a “red/eye, the cauldron of morning.” Former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky said her poems 'throw off images and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open.'
Similarly, here's part of her poem 'Cut,' which she wrote about cutting her thumb while cooking.
'What a thrill ---
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.'
By this use of imagery, Plath takes a commonplace experience and transforms it into something more. This allows the reader to relate to it even though he hasn’t considered it before. But while it allows the reader to relate, this imagery is also sort of disorienting (the poem begins with 'What a thrill').
Death
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –
We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –
Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –
Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
Death is given the persona of a placid and cordial character, not one to be feared since Dickinson states that he was kind. The entire scene is set up as intimately solace. Dickinson is known for her glib irony on issues such as death and suicide and the afterlife.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading - treading - till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through -
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum -
Kept beating - beating - till I thought
My mind was going numb -
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space - began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here -
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then –
It is thought that Dickinson is comparing her mental health to a funeral procession treading across her mind, which she symbolizes as a wooden floor. Emily Dickinson’s poetic work contains different descriptions of death that encompass emotional responses to the body’s and/or soul’s journey into eternity, madness, or nothingness. Her poems’ greatness comes from the elaborate use of literary techniques to give shape to death, and the ambiguity of meaning that allows different interpretations of these journeys. 'I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I Died' presents a vision of death in which there is no afterlife as it focuses on the putrefaction that occurs after the death of the poet herself, a process that, according to the poem, leads to nothingness. A contrasting vision of death appears in Dickinson’s poem 'Because I Could Not Stop for Death --.' Here, death is presented as a journey towards eternity. The poem depicts a vision of an afterlife, where the individual transcends and goes to a space where time seems not to exist. This is Dickinson’s romantic view of death. The poet personifies death as someone who is civil, patient, and respectful, and who gives rides to people. After Death stops for a busy poetic narrator who had no time to think about death, they start a journey together towards eternity, passing through places that symbolize different stages of her life. Emily Dickinson’s selected poems offer a varied repertoire of her apparent contradictory views of death. The clashing interpretations of death are accompanied by an elaborate use of literary techniques. Each poem reflects a different type of journey, and there is an implicit invitation to the reader to choose which definition of death goes better with his/her set of beliefs.
Plath’s first suicide attempt was in 1953. She crawled underneath her he crawled underneath her house and took her mother's sleeping pills and said later that she was 'blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion.
So here are a couple excerpts from one of Plath's most famous poems, Lady Lazarus:
'Dying Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same
Brute Amused shout:
‘A miracle!'
That knocks me out.'
'Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.'
The poem is brutal, and angry, and morbid. It involves a lot of corpses. But it's also a poem of empowerment, and in a weird way, it's kind of hopeful. It's the kind of hard, one hope that you can take with you no matter how difficult things get. Lazarus, of course, refers to the Bible story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. She's imagining herself as rising from the dead, because she lived through a suicide attempt.
Fiercely intelligent, penetrating and witty, Plath was also diagnosed with clinical depression. She used poetry to explore her own states of mind in the most intimate terms, and her breathtaking perspectives on emotion, nature and art continue to captivate and resonate.
Shortly after the publication of 'The Bell Jar,' Plath died by suicide at age 30. Two years later, the collection of poems she wrote in a burst of creative energy during the months before her death was published under the title 'Ariel.' Widely considered her masterpiece, Ariel exemplifies the honesty and imagination Plath harnessed to capture her pain.
In one of 'Ariel's' most forceful poems, 'Lady Lazarus,' she explores her attempts to take her own life through Lazarus, the biblical figure who rose from the dead. She writes, “and I a smiling woman/ I am only thirty/ And like the cat I have nine times to die.” But the poem is also a testament to survival: “I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air.” This unflinching language has made Plath an important touchstone for countless other readers and writers who sought to break the silence surrounding issues of trauma, frustration, and sexuality.
Conclusion
Dickinson is one of the most influential writers in the history of American writing and her influence can still be seen today. She is the most paradoxical of poets. The very poet of paradox: vividly present on the page but at the same time persistently elusive. Dickinson’s poems, like all the best poems, make a demand on us, but we are richly rewarded. Dickinson said ‘To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.’ Reading her poetry is equally startling. She also wrote a poem which begins, ‘I dwell in Possibility’; so do her poems and they offer us all manner of ways of understanding our own humanity and place in the universe. And the mystery is that all she has at her disposal, like all writers, is words. Also known as Queen Recluse, her life of reclusion, transcendentalism, and solitude shaped her poetry and persona to an insurmountable extent.
While her work can be shocking in its rage and trauma, Plath casts her readers as witnesses– not only to the truth of her psychological life, but to her astounding ability to express what often remains inexpressible. Throughout her unusual life experiences, Plath remained blisteringly lively. But they are these life experiences that lead to her unique writing style and outstanding use of literary techniques.
As such, it is curious to think that people should wonder why poetry is such an integral part of human expression. Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson understood the motivational factors that poetry innately possesses, in as much as each poet directed her distinct style toward that which influenced her most.
Bibliography
- Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52196/they-shut-me-up-in-prose-445
- Retrieved from https://genius.com/Emily-dickinson-title-divineis-mine-annotated
- Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bos5SkdJofU
- http://www.edickinson.org/. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson
- The Poetry Foundation. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/sylvia-plath
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