Plath and Confessional poetry

By : Soran Fadhil Ali

PhD student
University of Huddersfield UK

2014

Confessional poetry is an autobiographical mode of verse that Shows the

poet’s personal troubles with unusual frankness ; it is the poetry of personal and
private experiences in which different feelings and thoughts about traumatic
experiences (e.g. death , morbid conditions , relationships ) and emotional shocks
are expressed in this type of poetry , often in an autobiographical manner . The
term belongs to a group of poets of the United States from the late 1950s to the late
1960s . The best examples of confessional poetry are Robert Lowell’s "Life
Studies"(1959) and "For the Union Dead" (1964) which deal with his divorce and
mental breakdowns , Anne Sexton’s "To Bedlam" and "Part Way Back" (1960) and
"All My Pretty Ones" (1962) that carry the idea of abortion and life in a mental
hospital , John Berryman’s "Dream Songs" (1964) on alcoholism and insanity ,
Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems (1965) on suicide , and W. D. Snodgrass’s "Heart’s
Needle" (1969) on her divorce . The term “Confessional Poetry” was first used by
M. L. Rosenthal in 1959 in a review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies . Although the
term is applied to Robert Lowell’s poems but it is Sylvia Plath who is known as the
best confessionalist after the posthumous publication of her second poetry
collection Ariel (1965) (Bloom, 2007, 7-8) .

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 As Plath participated in Lowell’s poetry class in 1958 , she was greatly
affected by him and this experience led her finally to write confessional poems . So
she was influenced by other confessional poets for she confesses about this as she
says :

I’ve been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with,
say , Robert Lowell’s Life Studies , this intense breakthrough into very serious,
very personal , emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo …these
peculiar , private and taboo subjects , I feel , have been explored in recent
American poetry . I think particularly the poetess Anne Sexton , who writes about
her experience as a mother , as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown is an
extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully
craftsman – like poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological
depth which I think is something perhaps quite new , quite exciting (Gill: 20) .

Uroff (1999, 1-2) comments that , concerning the confessional mode of

poetry , Plath is in some way different from Robert Lowell as a confessional poet .
When M. L. Rosenthal coinages the term “Confessional Poetry” , he finds out that
Lowell’s poems reveal the idea of sexual guilt , alcoholism and mental diseases .
Lowell uses the first person pronoun which refers to the poet himself . In his
poems, Lowell wants the reader to find out the real person who has certain
problems: weaknesses , conflicts and senselessness that have a negative impact on
others . He is , unlike Plath , revealing information about himself in such away that
demeans and degrades him . And the speaker in the poem makes an act of
confession in a way that can't be forgiven by the reader .On the contrary , Plath
integrates and embodies abstracted autobiographical details in her poetry just to
release and present feelings of pain and sorrow not to demean her self – revelation .
Rosenthal assigns Plath as a confessional poet and says that the speakers of Plath’s
poems show her emotional weaknesses that are integrated to her civilization .
Plath’s characters are generalized for she calls certain people father or mother, and
she makes them harmful characters . She also causes herself harm for she never

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shows herself as a nice person . Plath’s speakers do not confess their distress and
suffering but express their feelings through anger , Plath says :

I think my poems immediately came out of the sensuous and emotional

experiences I have , but I must say I can't sympathize with these cries from
the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife ,or whatever it
is , I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even
the most terrifying , like madness , being tortured, this sort of experience, and
one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and
intelligent mind (Uroff: 2) .

It is obvious that the readers of Plath are not attracted by her art as much as
they are shocked by her life . Her life , from childhood , as an ambitious child who
wants to become a writer , her success at Smith college , two Fulbright years at
Cambridge , her marriage to the great poet Ted Hughes , and her suicide at the age
of thirty , are greatly fascinating . Most of the poems of Plath are concerned with
her own life and this is why , through reading her poems , the reader becomes
familiar with her private life . Plath is considered a confessional poet because of
revealing private family secretes in The Bell Jar , and also because of her repeated
suicide attempts which she tries to describe in her poems such as "Daddy" and
"Lady Lazarus" in which the idea of suicide and resurrection or death and rebirth
can easily be found .

There were two reasons behind Plath’s attempts to commit suicide , the
shock of her father’s death at the very beginning of her life and her husband’s
betrayal of her. When her father , Otto Plath , died she was only eight and she still
needed his support , so she felt that he was guilty for leaving her alone .

Bloom (2007: 9,14) states that Plath’s divorce from her husband , the poet
Ted Hughes in 1962 , also affected her psychological condition and suicidal
intensions . At the beginning , Plath was very happy with her husband and she

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devoted herself to him . But later on when she found out that Hughes betrayed her,
by having affair with another woman “Assia” , and then left her , she was
completely disappointed and frustrated . As a result Plath thought that her life was
meaningless and that it was better to commit suicide so that she could be
resurrected in a better way .

Here , Plath’s extraordinary use of metaphors and imagery to describe her

father are different before her separation from her husband , Ted Hughes , which is
called the happy and brighter period and the one after it which is called the
unhappy and desperate period . In her earlier poems , she uses light and positive
imagery and metaphors to describe her father and bring him to life again , and she
has a little hope .

In her first poem "Full Fathom Five" about her father which was written in
1958, she describes him in a beautiful and positive way for she compares him to a
‘sea god’ and that she wishes to join him in the sea . By this comparison she means
that her father is a part of the sea and when she looks at the sea she sees him . She
says that despite her certainty about his funeral and death , he is still alive in her
memory . She describes him as a huge man with white hair and beard . So , she sees
him as a wise , kind and perfect figure like the protagonist Prospero in The Tempest
who was a king and a hero :

Old man , you surface seldom .

Then you come in with the tide’s coming
When seas wash cold , foam .
Capped ; white hair , white beard , far – flung
A dragnet , rising , falling , as waves
Crest and trough . Miles long (p. 92, 1-6)

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 In another poem "The Colossus" (1959) , which is also written before her
separation from her husband , she is detecting a very personal experience about her
relationship with her father whom she both loves and hates at the same time
because he passed away and is still influencing her life . Plath transforms the image
of her father into a huge colossus that once prevailed over the harbor at Rhodes in
ancient Greece , which lies now broken into pieces . Here , Plath portrays the image
of her father as an object rather than a human being and thinks that her father is the
source of her muse . Plath devotes thirty years of her life to lament the memory of
her father and her need to confide herself to him and listen to him as a father , as
she tells him in "The Colossus" :

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat. (p. 129, 6-9)

Stevenson states that there are two sides of Plath’s personality the good and
the evil . By trying to commit suicide , the evil part wants to destroy the good part
so that the evil one can be free and purified :

Sylvia had long been confusing two very different battles within herself . One
was with an artificial Sylvia , modeled on her mother , driven by ambitions
she believed Aurelia harbored for her and ideas she thought Aurelia projected
. This battle was occurring on a comparatively superficial level . Beneath it ,
so to speak raged an altogether more serious war, where the “real” Sylvia
---- violent , subversive , moon – struck , terribly angry ----fought for her
existence against a nice , bright , gifted American girl . This “real” self may
have been created , and gone underground , at the time of her father’s death
in November 1940 . It had emerged in August 1953 , before her suicide attempt ,
and it remained in charge during the months of her slow recovery at
Mclean . It would be too simple to say that the nice girl wanted to live while
the vengeful deserted daughter wanted to die . But it was probably the case that

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 Sylvia’s powerful buried self was deadly in its determination to emerge at any
cost (Bloom: 12) .

Then Stevenson attacks the Mclean hospital for using shock treatment for
she thought that it caused Plath much harm than before and once again reminded
her of her father’s death which could not be forgotten :

They changed her personality permanently , stripping her of a psychological“skin”

she could ill afford to lose . Attributable to her ECT is the unseen menace that
haunts nearly everything she wrote , her conviction that the world however
benign in appearance , conceals dangerous animosity directed particularly
toward herself Sylvia’s Psychotherapy almost certainly opened up the dimensions
of her Freudian psychodrama , revealing the figure of her lost , “drowned”
father …whose death she could neither forgive nor allow herself to forget ;
psychotherapy also intensified the presence of her much –loved yet ultimately
resented mother , whose double she had to be , for reasons of guilt or ego
weakness and to whom she was tied by a psychic umbilicus too nourishing to
sever (Agarwal: 13) .

But after her separation from her husband , her attitude towards men changes
negatively . As she looked at her husband as her father , she uses morbid and dark
imagery to describe her dead father and her ex-husband and she expresses her
hatred toward both of them . Plath has written in her journal" My own father, the
buried male muse and god creator risen to be my mate in Ted (Plath, 2000: 381) .

In "Daddy" , which is written in 1962 after her separation from her

husband , there is a great shift from describing her father through beautiful and
light imagery to dark and desperate imagery . She starts the poem by imagining
herself a prisoner who lives like a foot in her father’s shoe all her life :

You do not do , you do not do

Any more , black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot

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 For thirty years , poor and white .
Barely daring to breath or Achoo . (p. 222, 1-4)

Plath herself describes "Daddy" in a BBC interview as :

A poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex . Her father died while
she thought he was god . Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was
also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish . In the daughter the
two strains marry and paralyze each other_ she has to act out the awful allegory
once over before she is free of it (Axelord: 24) .

In this poem she also describes her father as a culprit and guilty person by
comparing him to a Nazi who committed the holocaust and compares herself to a
Jew who was a victim to Nazis and holocaust and was taken to be tortured to
death . Plath mentions the name of those camps where the Jews were taken and
genocided like Dchau which was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in
Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the
medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich , Auschwitz was the
largest concentration camp established by the Nazi regime located approximately
37 miles west of Krakow, near the prewar German-Polish border in Upper Silesia ,
Belsen was also a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern
Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle :

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew .
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew .
I think I may well be a Jew. (223, 31-35)

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Plath wants to affirm that her husband is the representative of her father and that
both of them are vampires who torture her soul and she hopes to kill both of them :

If I've killed one man, I've killed two

The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now. (p. 224, 71-75)

So , she states that her husband has sucked her blood for seven years as a vampire
which is nearly the time period of seven years she has lived with Ted Hughes .
Susan R. explains that :

Clearly the aggressive back talk of the poem is aimed not merely at the
patriarch of the title but at the cultural construction of masculinity that
is first enacted by the father and later reproduced in the vampire husband
who also tortures and abandons the daughter (Van_Dyne: 49) .

Berck-Plage , which contains 126 lines , is another poem written by Sylvia

Plath on 30th June 1962 after her separation . She criticizes and demeans the priest
by comparing him to the black-boot Nazis :

This black boot has no mercy for anybody.

Why should it, it is the hearse of a dad foot,
The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
Who plumbs the well of his book,
The bent print bulging before him like scenery. (p. 197, 19-23)

Plath looks at the priest’s toeless foot as her father who lost his toe before his
death . And just like "Daddy" , she once more concentrates on the Nazi-Jew
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association . She sees her father and the priest as the Nazi transgressors and tyrants
and herself as the Jews who were genocided in the German camps known as the
Holocaust . Plath is psychologically baffled in such away that she can't forget her
father and she compares every frightening figure to her father . As the poem
progresses , the image of the priest becomes not just a simple and plain figure but a
frightening German whom Plath is scared of “The black-boot has no mercy for any
body” . Accordingly , for Plath ‘black-boot’ becomes a dark and gloom image
which can't be forgotten .

There are many other poems written by Plath after her separation from her
husband (like: "Lady Lazarus", "Fever 103" , "Edge" , "Cut" , "A Better
Resurrection" ) which confirm the image of death and rebirth and shed light on her
suicidal attempts relating her to the confessional poets . Plath tries her first attempt
on her life after her father’s death when she is ten . Then she tries her second
attempt at Smith college as she suffers from nervous breakdown . She uses these
suicidal attempts and other personal experiences in her poems to accuse her father
and her husband .

Psychologically , Plath is confused and shattered between love and hatred

which illustrates her Electra Complex relationship to her father . When she can't
achieve this goal in bringing him back to life and her attempts are useless , she
turns to violence . A. R. Jones says :

Torn between love and violence , the persona moves towards self-knowledge
, the awareness that she loves the violence , or , at least, towards the recognition
that the principles of love and violence are so intimately associated one with
the other that the love can only express itself in terms of the violence (Jones: 2) .

Butscher classifies Plath’s life into three stages : her childhood for she is a
distressed child because of her father’s death ; as a teenager and a poet , a wife and

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mother ; and her thwarted final days which are totally destroyed by her father’s
death and her husband’s betrayal :

Sylvia was three persons , three Sylvia’s in constant struggle with one another
for domination : Sylvia the modest , bright dutiful , hard –working ,
terribly efficient child of middle – class parents and strict Calvinist values
who was grateful for the smallest favor ; Sylvia the poet , the golden girl on
campus who was destined for great things in the arts and glittered when
she walked and talked ; and Sylvia the bitch goddess , aching to go on a
rampage of destruction against all those who possessed what she did not
and who made her career to their whims (Bloom, 2007 11) .

So both Stevenson and Butscher are unified in the idea of “Freudian

Psychodrama” but Butscher concentrates more on her father in such a way that he
is always the main perspective of Plath’s life . While Stevenson affirms that it is
not clear that Plath’s attempts to commit suicide belong to either her social
isolation or her father’s death . Because if she hadn't been isolated from society and
mixed with other children she would not think of her father as a holy person and
would not commit suicide . (Bloom, 2007: 11-13) .

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 References

Agarwal, Suman . Sylvia Plath . New Delhi , Northern Book Centre , 2003 .

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Jealous Gods". in The Norton Introduction to Literature .

Vol.2. New York: Norton and Company, 1998.

Bloom, Harold. Ed. Sylvia Plath: A Collection of Critical Essays . New

York: Infobase Publishing , 2007.

Jones, A.R. . On Daddy. http://www.yahoo.com. Retrieved 4 , November 2006 .

An
article of 5 pages .

Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughs. New
York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1981.

Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath . 1950-1960 , ed. Karen V. Kukil .
London: Faber and Faber, 2000 .

Uroff, M. D. Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry : A Resurrection . In Iowa

Review, Vol. 8, No. 1 , 1999 . ( n. p.) .

Van Dyne, Susan R. Revising Life:Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems. Carolina, University
of North Carolina Press, 1993.

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