When "Ariel" Was New: Early Critical Essays About Sylvia Plath

I got a hard copy of the earliest compilation of Sylvia Plath criticism, the journal Tri-Quarterly No. 7,  Fall 1966. This "Womanly Issue" devotes 50 pages to essays about Sylvia Plath's Ariel, written by male critics and a poet we can see were good at their jobs. It was generous, bold, even avant-garde for editor Charles Newman to dedicate an issue to female writers, although we can see from the issue's cover that even smart men when they pictured "women" pictured them naked.

Yet they were bowled over and rightly so by Ariel, published in the U.S. that May. Just inside is a full-page ad for Ariel. Would it persuade you to buy a book of poems by a dead female most people had never heard of? Maybe if you subscribed to Tri-Quarterly. Ariel's publishers really must hand it to Robert Lowell -- then a high-profile, public American poet -- for his rousing introduction, from an Ariel review. [1][2][3]

The issue reprints eighteen Sylvia Plath poems, starting with "The Death of Mythmaking" (1959) and "Sow" (1957) and ending with "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and "Words." There's also the earliest printing of Ted Hughes's essay "The Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems." A. Alvarez presented an essay written "partly as a tribute and and partly as an attempt to to show how those last strange poems might be read," and argued that Plath inflicted suffering upon herself -- covering for the fellow male who inflicted most of the suffering, and adding to the essay a sheepish headnote and endnote which is what you have to do when you lie.

Lois Ames and Anne Sexton contributed biographical, not critical, Plath essays. Ames, then Plath's official biographer, quoted from Plath's letters and journals as no one else then was able to, and from some sources I cannot now trace. To round out the "Womanly Issue," poet Richard Howard contributed five separate, warmly worded prose appreciations of the works of Isabella Gardner, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer (a darned good poet; Pulitzer 1985), May Swenson, and Susan Sontag, with full-page photos of their photogenic faces.

Newman collected the Tri-Quarterly essays and more in a book I like, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (1970). Appended are a valuable study, by Mary Kinzie, of the earliest U.K. and U.S. Ariel reviews, and facsimile drafts of the poem "Thalidomide." Newman was born and died in St. Louis and from the 1980s was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, but between 1988 and his death in 2006 no one there saw hide nor hair of him.

Tri-Quarterly digitized the issue and it may be read here.  

[1] Lowell, Robert, "On Two Poets," New York Review of Books, 12 May 1966.

[2] See different Ariel covers, U.S. and U.K., pictured and parsed in the course blog Technologies of Text, n.d.

[3] Two of the three blurbs appear only in this ad. The one from Robert Penn Warren reads: "A unique book -- it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as if somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night. It is a plangent, painful book, with all the pain translated into beauty, nothing less." Anne Sexton's blurb reads, "I am very moved. These last poems stun me." The third blurb, from The Times Literary Supplement, would become familiar: "One of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."

"Forbidden Fruit": Aurelia Plath's Poems*

 

 

Aurelia Schober was 17 years old when her high-school yearbook, The Echo, 1923, published her poem "Forbidden Fruit." The Winthrop, Massachusetts High School yearbook, like many high-school and college yearbooks of the time, printed samples of students' creative writings. Aurelia's college yearbook in 1928 published another of her poems, unsigned (p. 196), but in the 1970s Aurelia Schober Plath identified it for Plath biographer Harriet Rosenstein:

 

A CHILD'S WISH

 

The sky is blue and the wind blows free,

Oh come for a run on the beach with me!

 

We will delve in the sand and race with the waves

We will jump on the rocks where the salt sea laves,

We will ponder the driftwood strewn up by the tide,

We will search for a cavern where mermaidens hide.

 

And then in a calm we might hear a roar

Of very great waves on a distant shore.

Far out on the point a light tow'r we see,

Oh won't you come for a run with me?

 

Emotionally and technically "A Child's Wish" is such a regression that if Aurelia wrote it after writing "Forbidden Fruit," and after reading contemporary poetry books that we know Aurelia owned and annotated, such as Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon (1926) and Edna St. Vincent Millay's The King's Henchman (1927), "A Child's Wish" might be a "decoy" or "dummy" poem. Remember, Aurelia in 1928 was not yet married, a mother, or a schoolteacher, so did not write this poem for her children.

 

A "decoy" poem is what a college student caught in and crushed by a fiery love affair with a man 22 years older writes to show her parents, who want her to be a secretary, that she is still pure and innocent. Aurelia was her college yearbook's editor that year. The yearbook's creative-writing pages printed 17 pieces, all unsigned; at the end are listed ten different authors, including Aurelia. What I call a "dummy" poem is a bloodless exercise on an unobjectionable topic, such as a child on the beach. Maybe a reader of "Forbidden Fruit" had hinted to Aurelia that young women should not write, for all the world to see, about succumbing to temptation, and suggested to her that poetry in general led into morally dubious territory.

Or else "A Child's Wish" was the best Aurelia could do.

 

Aurelia's annotations on her daughter Sylvia Plath's letters and papers show how habitually Aurelia expressed one thing while thinking another. Proof that she wasn't born that way is that Aurelia never hid her feelings well. What's building as I research Aurelia's life is a picture of young Aurelia as a leader, intrepid, adventurous, game; then backpedaling. Sylvia too played at feminine artifice, but became renowned for finally telling it like it was.

Aurelia also wrote a greeting-card-type poem for her daughter Sylvia's 13th birthday, rather cliche, nothing special. Yet it is fortunate for literature that Aurelia loved poetry and had practiced the craft, hands-on, and then guided and supported her gifted Sylvia, although Aurelia herself ultimately gave it up.

*Aurelia Plath did not compose the poem "Rebecca," about a little girl with a doll, Rebecca, who "caught a chill" and needed special care. The poem, credited to Eleanor Piatt, first appeared in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, vol. 36, in 1909. Aurelia copied it into a letter she sent to Sylvia in 1938, specifying that it was a poem she had enjoyed as a child.