I am vs Am I? :

I am vs Am I? :

Themes of Confessional Poetry and Identity in Plath and Hughes

FONTS

- Poems in Retrospect: Before Plath’s death

Modern v. Postmodern Identity

Sense of self seems absorbed in her:

- Poems in ‘present tense’: After Plath’s death

Post Modern : Fragmented Identity

Modern : Core Identity

Ted Hughes - Pre- Birthday Letters

 'Fidelity': It was somewhere to live. I was /

Just hanging around, courting you.

 'Drawing': As you drew

I felt released, calm. Time opened

When you drew the market at Benidorm.

I sat near you, scribbling something.

Hours burned away.

Layers

Identity evolves

Affected by environment

 'Visit':

You are ten years dead. It is only a story.

Your story. My story.

 'The Blue Flannel Suit':

Permanently now, permanently

Bending so briefly at your open coffin

Can find “self”

All same underneath

Fixed Identity

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over

Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge

I enter water. What am I to split

The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed

Of the river above me upside down very clear

What am I doing here in mid-air?

- from 'Wodwo'

Confessional Poetry

Birthday Letters

Phenomenology

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

- from 'Hawk Roosting'

Investigation of present as experienced

- Thought Fox vs. Epiphany

Poetry of the personal or “I”

Dealt with private experiences and feelings

Dialogue between self and others

First public volume openly published as

confessional poetry

Disregards presuppositions

Dialogue with environment

Introduced by Robert Lowell

"Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us is a revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of.... The real mystery is this strange need [to share]." – Ted Hughes, before the publishing of Birthday Letters

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock’s loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

- from 'The Thought Fox'

Consider 'Wodwo', 'Hawk Roosting', and the Crow poems.

Are Hughes's animals/animal poetry a post modern representation of himself?

How does his earlier distaste for confessional poetry complicate this?

'Lady Lazarus'

‘Poetry in the Making: Three Extracts’:

“The animal I never succeeded in keeping alive is the fox.”

“The poem does not have anything you could easily call a meaning. It is about a fox, obviously enough, but a fox that is both a fox and not a fox. What sort of a fox is it that can step right into my head where presumably it still sits, smiling to itself when the dogs bark. It is both a fox and a spirit.”

“As it is, every time I read the poem the fox comes up again out of the darkness and steps into my head.”

by Aubrey Colman-Fenton, Samantha Mitchell, and Sarah Turchanik

‘The Rabbit Catcher’:

With 'Epiphany', Ted Hughes seems to be revisiting his ‘thought fox’ – this time, he lets it go to be with Plath

Wife/Mother

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it-----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The Peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot ------

The big strip tease.

Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

 Then I walked on

As if out of my own life.

I let that fox-cub go.

 If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox

Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –

I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?

But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

Domestic Life

Relationship with Ted

Women’s Gender Role (in a marriage)

In those snares

You’d caught something.

Had you caught something in me,

Nocturnal and unknown to me? Or was it

Your doomed self, your tortured, crying,

Suffocating self? Whichever,

Those terrible, hypersensitive

Fingers of your verse closed round it and

Felt it alive. The poems, like smoking entrails,

Came soft into your hands.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it's a poultice.

You have an eye, it's an image.

My boy, it's your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

- from 'The Applicant'

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.

It's easy enough to do it and stay put.

It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

'A miracle!'

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart---

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

• Whatever comes with a fox as a test of a marriage ---> giving up sense of self? He claims he would have passed, but it is a question whether she would. He then states that he failed. Failed because he left?

Could this be a comment on his loss of self?

Sylvia Plath - Sense of Self

Final Questions:

Poet/Writer

Depression

In regards to sense of self, would you say Plath was more of a modern or post modern writer? Hughes?

Contributing factors

Her methods of coping

Confessional Poetry

Women’s Gender Role (in the literary world)

Do you think Hughes changed and embraced confessional poetry?

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:

This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,

And the white person is certainly the superior one.

She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.

At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --

She lay in bed with me like a dead body

And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

- from, 'In Plaster'

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

What ever you see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful---

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

- from 'The Mirror'

Is it too far reaching to state that Hughes’s earlier denial of confessional poetry can be considered a denial of what his sense of self was transforming/transformed into?

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.

- from The Bell Jar

Can you think of any (other?) examples of when Plath reflects phenomenologically?