Biography As Poetic Landscape

 

 

          No study of  the work of Sylvia Plath since her death in 1963, has been able to avoid playing witness to the relation­ship between biography and the art of writing. Her suicide became a catalyst for submitting her work to a variety of suppositions and lay psychology resulting in a good number of books and essays. Many of these examined her personal history as an extension of her poetry and prose. Yet, while conjuring up an iconic figure in American literature, most of those authors overlooked the simple human being named Sylvia. As a result, whether the relationship between her biography and her art is deemed to be parasitic or symbiotic, the candour of her poetic voice is presented as a window on her life and views. I will argue that few of the pot-boiling theories which attempt to define the relationship between life and craft will bring us any closer to an understanding of the creative process.

          Biography may have a part to play in the interpreta­tion of any author's work, providing important indica­tions of the social context in which various pieces are produced. But the correlation can be taken too far. For instance, though Plath was a self-determined-exile living in England, she was born into a middle-class New England life. Therefore, she is not a British writer and her relation­ship to American concepts and American writers are important to  the contemplation of her work as the literary events surrounding her in London.

          In one of the more sympathetic examinations of Plath, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, Don Rosenblatt presents a thesis for symbolic enactment of initiation rites in her poetry. While stepping aside from much of the previous hypotheses, he reminds us:
     "there are important links between her work and that of Roethke, Lowell,    

     Berryman, and Sexton. A heightened awareness of the individual's painful

     entrapment in contemporary society becomes the central focus of their

     poems" (1) 

He continues:
    "such personal poetry is not an invention of American poets since WW II, but

    has existed for thousands of years... two thousand years ago Catullus patterned

    his lyrics around autobio­graphical events to a greater degree than Plath." (2)

          Despite this, Plath, more than any other poet rising in the 1950s in America, has provoked a circuitous style of criticism which begins in the poem and reaches out through biographical elements to personal history, often inspiring a critique of the previous criticisms of her work in the development of a brand new thesis before spiraling back to the poem itself.

          There are, in plain fact, a plethora of reviews which do little to advance our

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January 2008.

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