A testimony of the misbegotten : tension and discord in the poems of Sylvia Plath with special reference to Poem for a birthday

Abstract

At the age of thirty Sylvia Plath died by her own hand. When she was nineteen and a student at Smith College, she had a nervous breakdown and tried to take her own life. She was dramatically rescued, and several years later she wrote a sequence of seven poems entitled "Poem for a Birthday" in which she used her attempted suicide and subsequent stay in a mental hospital as subject matter•. This sequence of poems can be considered the watershed between her early poems which she herself dismissed as "juvenilia" and her later poems which were published posthumously and upon which her reputation as a poet rests. A discussion of "Poem for• a Birthday" forms the main body of this dissertation. Chapter Two deals with psychological literary criticism. It begins with a brief history of informal psychological criticism, and includes a discussion of the theories of Freud and Jung as applied to literature. Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism is also considered. Events from her early childhood up till the time "Poem for a Birthday" was written are discussed •in Chapter Three, since they have a bearing on the poem. Attention is given to the dua1ity of her personality and her spurious self-esteem. In Chapter Four poets who influenced Plath in het• poetic deve1opment are discussed. Surrealism and Paul Radin's collection of African folk-tales which interested her greatly while she was writing "Poem for a Birthday" are also looked into. Chapter Five offers a discussion of Robert Graves' The White Goddess and Sir James G. Frazer 's The Golden Bough, both of which form the basis of the myth Plath created in her poetry. In Chapter Six the seven poems in the sequence are analysed. The metamorphosis of the persona in every poem is traced, and is linked to the spiritual regeneration of the poet herself. However, instead of being completely regenerated at the end of the sequence, she finds herself only temporarily repaired, hoping to be "good as new". Plath's myth-making is considered once again in Chapter Seven, and here some of her late poems are referred to, viz. those which strengthen the idea of the dying god and the mourning goddess. Her true and false selves and the idea of death and rebirth or transcendence are also discussed. "Poem for a Birthday" is not really one of Plath's best poems. Its importance is that it clearly indicates the direction the later poetry, on which her reputation really rests, was to take .