Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements.
from "Morning Song", Ariel, 1965[94]
Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore.[55] Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 20. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is filled with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the 40 poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.[55]
Plath's landscape poetry, which she wrote throughout her life, has been described as "a rich and important area of her work that is often overlooked...some of the best of which was written about the Yorkshire moors". Her September 1961 poem "Wuthering Heights" takes its title from the Emily Brontë novel, but its content and style is Plath's own particular vision of the Pennine landscape.[95]
It was Plath's publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated her rise to fame and helped establish her reputation as one of the 20th century's best poets. As soon as it was published, critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect and remains so.[5] Time and Life both reviewed the slim volume of Ariel in the wake of her death.[43] The critic at Time said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape...In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus', fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder'."[96][c] On January 16, 2004, The Independent in London published an article which ranked Ariel as the third best book of modern poetry among its T10 Best Modern Poetry Books.
Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius".[43] Writer Honor Moore describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened ... Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified."[98] Some feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name.[43]
Smith College, Plath's alma mater, holds her literary papers in the Smith College Library.[99]
The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012.[100][101][102] An English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence at 3 Chalcot Square, in London.[29]
In 2018, The New York Times published an obituary for Plath[103] as part of the Overlooked history project.[104][105]
Portrayals in media
Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962.[106] Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote:
I have never before learned anything from a poetic reading, unless the clothes, the beard, the girls, the poor or good condition of the poet can be considered a kind of knowledge. But I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath's reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts, of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems—"Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", "The Applicant", "Fever 103°"—were beautifully read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerizing cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. "I have done it again!" Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying, "Uncover, dogs, and lap!"[107]
Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Despite criticism from Elizabeth Sigmund, a friend of Plath and Hughes, that Plath was portrayed as a "permanent depressive and possessive person", she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy".[108] Frieda Hughes, now a poet and painter, who was age 2 when her mother died, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' lives. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by the family's tragedies.[109] In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother" in Tatler:[110]
Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children ... they think I should give them my mother's words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll
Musical settings
- In his Ariel: Five Poems of Sylvia Plath (1971), American composer Ned Rorem has set for soprano, clarinet and piano the poems "Words", "Poppies In July", "The Hanging Man", "Poppies In October", and "Lady Lazarus."[111][112]
- Also drawing from Ariel, in his Six Poems by Sylvia Plath for solo soprano (1975), German composer Aribert Reimann has set the poems "Edge", "Sheep In Fog", "The Couriers", "The Night Dances", and "Words."[113] He later set "Lady Lazarus" (1992), also for solo soprano.[114][115]
- Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's five-part From the Grammar of Dreams for soprano and mezzo a cappella (1988)[116] is constructed on a collage of fragments from The Bell Jar and the poem "Paralytic."[117] The piece was also arranged by the composer into a version for soprano and electronics (2002), in which the singer sings in interaction with a recorded double of her own voice.[118] Albeit composed as a concert piece, From the Grammar of Dreams has also been staged.[119][120]
- American composer Juliana Hall's Lorelei (1989) for mezzo, horn, and piano is a setting of Plath's poem of the same name.[121] Hall had previously set "The Night Dances" as a movement of her cycle for soprano and piano Night Dances (1987) featuring texts by five female poets,[122][123] and went on to write a song cycle for soprano and piano entirely devoted to Plath, Crossing The Water (2011), which comprises the poems "Street Song", "Crossing The Water", "Rhyme", and "Alicante Lullaby."[124]
- In her cycle for soprano and piano The Blood Jet (2006), American composer Lori Leitman set the poems "Morning Song", "The Rival", "Kindness", and "Balloons."[125][126]
