{"id":22849,"date":"2023-02-10T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T09:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ounews.co\/?p=22849"},"modified":"2023-02-10T09:00:12","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T09:00:12","slug":"the-path-of-plath-sylvias-work-more-enduring-60-years-on-from-her-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/arts-social-sciences\/the-path-of-plath-sylvias-work-more-enduring-60-years-on-from-her-death\/","title":{"rendered":"The path of Plath: Sylvia\u2019s work more enduring 60 years on from her death"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 60 years since the celebrated poet Sylvia Plath died, yet her work has become more enduring with the passage of time. Here Dr Jane Yeh<\/a>, a lecturer in creative writing at The Open University, and an accomplished poet herself, tells us why.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sylvia Plath is the poet people most are likely to have come across when they\u2019re young or when they first start to get interested in poetry or creative writing.<\/p>\n

Yet Jane says her untimely death, at her own hand, unjustly eclipses a poet who broke the mould, was ahead of her time but, strangely, submitted to the conformity of a Fifties marriage.<\/p>\n

Troubled life<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/em>The inescapable fact is that Plath was tragically young when she died, just 30. She was someone who had lived with a series of mental-health illnesses, which saw her undergo electrotherapy, and experienced unhappiness in her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlath talked about the kind of things that hadn\u2019t been talked about before in poetry,\u201d said Jane, \u201cin a time when people wouldn\u2019t write about aspects of their lives that were ugly, or too personal.\u201d<\/p>\n

She says you see the difference immediately when you compare her work to someone like Wordsworth writing about daffodils or standing on Westminster Bridge.<\/p>\n

A confessional poet<\/h2>\n

Plath was a confessional poet. Jane says: \u201cThe whole point of these confessional poets in the 1960s\/70s was they were writing about things that were meant to be kept private \u2013 such as having depression or being bipolar, or staying in a mental hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlath doesn\u2019t refer to these experiences in detail and it\u2019s not like reading someone\u2019s memoir or their diary when you read her work \u2013 and she was a prolific journal keeper.\u201d<\/p>\n

Life developed many challenges for her such as a husband who painfully cheated on her and the effect her father\u2019s death had on her. She also had a previous suicide attempt.<\/p>\n

‘Striking, original voice’<\/h2>\n

\u201cYou have to dig into the poems to realise what she\u2019s talking about. They\u2019re stylised, which is actually what makes them more interesting works of art, not just someone\u2019s journal entries,\u201d explains Jane.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Dr Jane Yeh<\/p><\/div>\n

She describes Plath\u2019s work as \u201ca striking, original voice that is distinctive, bold and declarative but witty, too\u201d.<\/p>\n

Plath was also frustrated by the decade she was forced to live in: \u201cAs a young adult in the Fifties, it was a very repressed time. The possibilities for women, the kind of life you could have, the kind of profession you could aim for were so limited,\u201d says Jane.<\/p>\n

So what makes a great poet? \u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s a subjective thing, but when you read one of Plath\u2019s poems you would never mistake it for one by someone else. The way she uses language and inventive images is part of her greatness.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven though she lived in different times to today I think a lot of women feel the kind of constrictions she felt that are, in some ways, still around for women today. That\u2019s one reason why she\u2019s an interesting figure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suggested further reading of Plath\u2019s works include her book of poetry, \u2018Ariel\u2019, published after her death, and her novel \u2018The Bell Jar\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

Picture credits: <\/em>main image – Edward Haylan for Shutterstock; <\/em>Plath image – Olga Popova for Shutterstock; Jane Yeh – Andy Rogers<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 60 years since the celebrated poet Sylvia Plath died, yet her work has become more enduring with the passage of time. Here Dr Jane Yeh, a lecturer in creative writing at The Open University, and an accomplished poet herself, tells us why. Sylvia Plath is the poet people most are likely to have come […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":22856,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,3],"tags":[860,869,1525,1640],"class_list":["post-22849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-literature-music","category-arts-social-sciences","tag-faculty-of-fass","tag-fass","tag-news-home","tag-ou-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22849\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}