SYLVIA PLATH

Sylvia Plath’s life was brief, but unusually concentrated. Born in Massachusetts in 1932, she began publishing poetry as a child and went on to study at Smith College and Cambridge. In 1953, during a period of severe depression, she attempted suicide and subsequently underwent psychiatric treatment. The experience would later become the basis, transformed into fiction, of The Bell Jar (1963).

She married the English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. They had two children, and the marriage ended in separation in 1962. It was after this separation, during the extraordinary final months of her life, that Plath wrote many of the poems that would become Ariel: poems of acceleration, eruption and transformation, in which the controlled surfaces of language repeatedly seem to burst open. The Colossus, published in 1960, still often works through dense structures of myth, memory and formal restraint; Ariel, by contrast, contains the astonishing velocity Queyras describes as “the piston in motion” — syllables pressing against one another, images rushing forward, the poem seeming to move faster than the self that speaks it.

This movement is also a movement between states: stasis and eruption, containment and excess, the ordinary self and the larger, almost theatrical figures into which the poetic self repeatedly transforms itself. In “Ariel”, the speaker becomes movement itself; in “Lady Lazarus”, death and resurrection become performances of identity; in “Years”, eternity is rejected in favour of something more immediate and terrifyingly alive. Plath’s late poems do not merely describe psychological crisis. They turn crisis into rhythm, imagery, repetition and dramatic persona.

Plath died by suicide in London on February 11, 1963, aged thirty. Ariel was published posthumously in 1965, edited by Hughes from the poems she had left behind. Her death subsequently became so powerful a part of her public mythology that it became difficult to separate the poet from the image of the doomed, suffering woman.

But this is precisely where Queyras’s poem becomes more complicated. Plath appears neither simply as victim nor simply as master of her imagination. Janet Malcolm’s description of her journals as marked by “manic defences” of a romantic imagination suggests another possibility: that imagination itself could be both a means of survival and a source of entrapment. Queyras therefore ends with a disturbing paradox: “We are either victims of our imagination or our lack / Of imagination.” With or without “adequate containment”, we remain, somehow, vulnerable to what the mind can make of experience.

What makes Plath Plath, then, may be less the tragedy of her biography than this unstable conversion of experience into form: the pressure of a mind that refuses to remain still, and the poetry that emerges when that pressure becomes impossible to contain.