Sylvia Plath was significantly influenced by Roethke and Lowell; elegized by Lowell and Berryman. Her poetry also derived its power from madness. Their example encouraged her to develop the expression of mental anguish and had a dramatic effect on the next generation of American poets. Her life and work show some striking similarities to the four poets discussed in this book ("Manic Power"; Arbor House Publishers, New York). Plath's father, who died when she was a child, was a significant figure in her poetry. Though nourished and stimulated by marriage to a fellow writer, she was intensely competitive and ambitious, and (toward the end of her life) felt victimized by her poet-husband. In search of a poetic style, she came under the magnetic influence of Dylan Thomas. She identified with the Jews as archetypes of suffering. She endured periods of madness, believed that mania could deepen awareness and inspire great art. She saw the poet as a sacrificial figure and committed suicide. Her posthumous fame was far greater than her reputation during her lifetime.
Though Plath never met Jarrell nor discussed his poetry, certain aspects of her life and personality resembled his. They were brilliant students and showed great poetic promise while still in their teens. They were fascinated by German culture and history. They venomously portrayed colleagues and friends in their idiosyncratic novels. They were conventional, domestic, puritanical and repressed. They had a rigid, all-or-nothing personality that could shatter in times of crisis. They attempted suicide and finally succeeded.
Like Berryman, Plath did graduate work at Cambridge University, had a self-lacerating black humor, mourned and execrated her dead father, predicted her suicide in her poetry and left young children to suffer a parent's death, which had blighted her own life.
The theme of the witty song 187-"Them lady poets must not marry, pal"-Echoes James' "The Lesson of the Master" and Yeats' "The Choice": "The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of life or of work." Most modern poets tried for perfection of the work and were forced, by creative anguish, to sacrifice the life. Berryman suggests that it is nearly impossible for a married woman-responsible through her children, for "perfection of the life"-to be a poet. When Plath failed to resolve the conflict between life and art, she poured out her last poems and abandoned her children. Berryman uses Plath to represent his own condition by contrasting her marriage to the solitary life of literary lesbians and spinsters-Sappho, the Brontes, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. Plath has handed in her credentials and left the two surviving infants and a widower to make what they could of her death. He compares Plath's short life to the longevity of Moore and Bishop and describes her violent death as if she had merely resigned from life. He emphasizes the effect of her suicide on her infants (both less than three years old) and stresses the ineradicable guilt of the husband who betrayed and survived her.
In the crucial song 153, Berryman places Plath among the poetic casualties of the "wrecked generation": Roethke, Blackmur, Jarrell, Schwartz. But Plath, not part of this generation by birth (Blackmur was twenty-eight years older than Plath), was linked to it by her tragic fate. Since she died by her own hand,
Berryman's formal elegy (song 172), like those on Roethke and Jarrell, compressed the essence of Plath's life into eighteen lines. Concentrating on her suicide, he stares at the geography of grief that marks her brooding photograph and speaks of the torrent of poetry (inspired by the break-up of her marriage) as well as the deep depression that made "The ovens seem the proper place for you." He imagines and screams of her orphaned children and offers a conventional consolation. Since she died at thirty, after two suicide attempts, her "torment here was brief." A lonely and guilty survivor, Berryman wonders why he alone is left and whether he should continue to bear the pain of life. In a late interview Berryman tried to suggest grandiose reasons for Plath's emblematic suicide: "From public officials we expect lies, and we get them in profusion. Perhaps Sylvia Plath did the necessary thing by putting her head I the oven, not having to live with those lies." But Berryman's rationalization was absurd (nobody ever killed himself because politicians lie) and he was actually using Plath's death as a model or excuse for his own.
Plath knew Roethke and Lowell personally and apprenticed herself to heir work. Plath, who believed in signs and omens, would have been struck by the similarities between Roethke's life and her own. Their fathers, Otto Roethke and Otto Plath, were born in Pomeranian towns (Pasewalk and Grabo) less than one hundred miles from each other and came to America as children. Otto Plath's father, like Otto Roethke's son, was named Theodore; Plath's husband was called Ted. Plath's father earned a Master's degree at the University of Washington, where Ted Roethke spent most of his academic career. The death of their fathers during their childhood was the most traumatic event in the lives of Roethke and Plath. Both felt guilt as well as loss, suffered mental breakdowns and endured electric shock treatments. Both portrayed their fathers as God-like figures and absorbed the symbols of their fathers' work-greenhouse and beehive-into their poetic vision.
Ted Hughes has pointed out that Sylvia Plath began her close and sympathetic study of Roethke when isolated at Yaddo in 1959. She plundered him directly at first, but in "Poem for a Birthday" transformed his work into her own distinct style: "She had always responded strongly to "Theodore Roethke's poems, but it was only at Yaddo, in October, that she realized how he could help her. This sequence began as a deliberate Roethke pastiche, a series of exercises which would be light and throwaway to begin with, but might lead to something else the result was a series of pieces, each a monologue of some character in an underground, primitive dream. STONES was the last of them, and only one not obviously influenced by Roethke. It is full of specific details of her experience in a mental hospital."
Plath's
Plath adopted Roethke's short lines, bumpy cadence and fragmented language as well as his plant imagery and his concern for creatures victimized by the cruelty of nature. Quoting D. H. Lawrence in "Some Remarks on Rhythm," Roethke wrote: "It all depends on the pause, the natural pause' in other words, the breath unit, the language that is natural to the immediate thing, the particular emotion." Plath repeated this idea about rhythm in an interview of 1962. Using Lowell and Roethke to exemplify craftsmanship, she declared: "The poets I delight in are possessed by their poems as by the rhythms of their own breathing. Their finest poems seem born all-of-a-piece, not put together by hand: certain poems in Robert Lowell's
Marjorie Perloff has demonstrated, with parallel passages, how "Poem for a Birthday" "Plath perfectly assumes [Roethke's] voice, his image patterns, his aphorisms," but does now share his attitude toward the "lovely diminutives" of nature. Margaret Uroff has noted Roethke's influence on two other Plath poems written at Yaddo: "Mushrooms" and "The Burnt-Out Spa," with its Roethkean image-"Little weeds insinuate / Soft suede tongues." And she concludes that Roethke had a technical and thematic impact on a poet whose temperament was quite different and response to nature more guarded: "His association of the human and natural world, his search for his own identity through this association, the uncertainty and vulnerability he admits, as well as his poetic confrontation of his own insanity-all these attitudes and interests find expression in Plath's poem. She took from Roethke's poetry certain images, rhythms, and a general idea of how she might handle madness as a subject for poems; but "Poem for a Birthday' shares neither Roethke's participation in nature nor his driving sincerity and openness.
" Roethke's influence on Plath's last poem, which Hughes did not mention, has not been noticed. In "In A Dark Time," his greatest poem on nature, Roethke refers to his tense balance on the abyss and states: "The edge is what I have." In "Edge," Plath predicts her own death as clearly as Berryman did in his final poem. She imagines herself laid out as a corpse, surrounded by her dead children, coiled near the empty pitchers of milk. In Plath, the Roethkean flowers stiffen and the odors bleed. She is ready for death
Fellow poets were quick to notice the new influence on her poetry. Anne Sexton, a friend whose work was often linked with Plath's said: "I remember writing to Sylvia in England after
Another extremist poet, W. D. Snodgrass, who had been a student of both Lowell and Jarrell, suggested that Roethke's influence may also have reached Plath indirectly, through Hughes: "It seems to me very interesting that she would take Roethke's voice, because I think very much of her work was determined by her hatred of her husband, by her detestation of the man who is the greatest living English poet, an incredibly powerful man, and one who often takes much the same subject matter that Roethke takes, but is better at it."
On February 1, 1961, just before her miscarriage and appendectomy, Plath met Roethke in London. In a letter to her mother, she praised his work, acknowledged his influence and admired his character: "Ted and I went to a little party last night to meet the American poet I admire next to Robert Lowell-Ted (for Theodore) Roethke. I've always wanted to meet him, as I find he is my influence! He's a big, blond, Swedish-looking man, much younger-seeming than his 52 years…Ted and I got on well with him and hope to see him again."
In early March, Eric White, of the Poetry Book Society, told Roethke about the desperate plight of Plath and Hughes, and the older poet responded generously: "Hughes did not keep accounts and at that time was nearly destitute-Sylvia Plath was in a hospital for an operation and Hughes was trying to keep house with their year-old child…Ted, who admired the work of both Hughes and Sylvia Plath, was immediately concerned and wanted to send her flowers, but, he said, he was leaving England and would not have the time, so he gave White some money and asked him to do it for him. Later, he tried to get Ted Hughes a job at Washington." It is just possible that Roethke sent the tulips that inspired Plath's hospital poem and influenced Berryman's Dream Song.