The three "R's" of poetry--writing, reading, and reviewing--are personal processes. In this way, poems resemble paintings, their right-brain correlates. The best capture the poet's feelings and experience. The reader filters a poem through the emotions and events already experienced. The response is more often "Yes, that's what it's like!" than "So, that's what it's like." Similarly, a reviewer or critic brings to bear only the sum total of his or her own life, more or less disguised as an impartial estimation of a book's worth.
Precious is the opportunity to view a word artist's prepublication presentation, the exact order and appearance the poet wanted for a collection of works, not mediated or moderated by an editor and the publishing processes. Given the chance to choose, what poet wouldn't want the work printed as created with spelling, punctuation, and capitalization intact? The selection and arrangement of poems in a collection might also hold an intended meaning.
These are treasures that the restored edition of Ariel with Sylvia Plath's manuscript offers. Not only are the poems printed as faithfully to Plath's final draft as possible; we get to see a facsimile of that manuscript, and more. Here we can view the creative process at work in revisions of the individual poem "Ariel", Plath's markings, if not her thoughts, on succeeding drafts of the work in progress.
A foreword by Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, offers not insight (she was a child when her mother committed suicide in 1963), but a guide to the differences between the way Plath presented her work and way it appeared in print subsequent to her death. She even points out the scathing diatribes against her father, Ted Hughes, that he chose to omit from the first editions of the book which appeared in the U.K. in 1965 and the U.S. in 1966.
When Plath wrote her last poems and lost her battle with the darkness of depression, I wouldn't have appreciated her efforts. Now, few women born after 1960 can comprehend their impact, but for opposite reasons. While Plath transmuted anguish into verse, I watched an inebriated visiting poet, Theodore Roethke, nearly stumble off the stage of a Northwestern University theater into my lap. Dr. Bergan Evans' advice to pursue writing couldn't counter the discouraging words from my creative writing professors. Prior to those incidents, my advisor in Speech insisted there was no place for women in broadcast production. In high school, a few years earlier, I was told "women can't be broadcast engineers". That's how it was, before "Women's Lib".
Article comments
1 - Harry Forbes
Wow. You did an effective job raising my curiosity about Plath, Georganna. Nice work.
2 - Bryce Eddings
Very nice review.
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