Authors
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Bibliography
Biography
Search the archive for images
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The poems of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich have greatly influenced not only the achievement of a feminist voice in contemporary American letters but also the construction of a feminist poetics, a poetics which resists the prescriptions of Emerson, Whitman, Eliot, and others who affirm that the poet must achieve dominion over worldly experience, rather than conduct an open-ended dialogue with life and its various circumstances. Plath is often read as a martyr, dying young in a cultural context hostile to the fuller expression she sought. Rich is a poet of deep and daring transformations -- of herself, of her voice and prosody, and of her role as a poet in a fast-changing postwar America.
1. Plath's Ariel and Rich's Diving into the Wreck are the title poems of important collections by their respective authors. These are poems about change, about the transformation of the self. Describe the different developments of this theme in each poem. Why would these poems be appropriate as capstones to or centerpieces in collections of verse?
2. In section 9 of Rich's Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1960), the speaker says, "Time is male / and in his cups drinks to the fair." In her poem I Am in Danger--Sir-- (1966), Rich's speaker addresses Emily Dickinson as "you, woman, masculine / in single-mindedness." In these and other situations, what does Rich mean by "male" or "masculine"? Why does she refer to time itself, and to an admired woman poet, in this way?
3. Readers are often surprised to learn that Sylvia Plath's father, addressed in Daddy, was not a Nazi or a member of Hitler's Wehrmacht, but a comfortable entomologist and American citizen living in New England. Discuss Plath's use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery to describe her upbringing in a middle-class family. Compare this to Rich's use of "Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon" in section V of her Atlas of the Difficult World.
4. In Blackberrying (1961), Plath uncharacteristically uses long lines, suggestive more of Whitman than of the compression and intensity of Dickinson. Is this change of strategy effective, given the theme and mood of the poem? When Rich uses long, Whitmanesque lines in the final section of Atlas, what are the effects? In general, which form seems to you more effective for each of these writers: the lyric, with short, tight lines; or the discursive poem in a more open form? Find examples to develop your answer.