Sylvia Plath and the Art That Flows From Rejection

‘The Poems of Sylvia Plath’ Edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. KukilFaber & Faber, 896 pagesWhat would seem tedious in a biography: listing dates of poems submitted, rejected or accepted, detailing changes in specific poems — what Plath crossed out, added or subtracted— how many poems she wrote in a particular year and in what order, and the color of paper she preferred to write on, make for fascinating, obsessive reading in this new collection, which nearly doubles the number of poems in “Collected Poems” (1981), edited by Ted Hughes.Even biographers and scholars who have worked in the Plath archives will be surprised and gratified to have texts of poems not only as Plath published them but in versions she worked on, so that one is almost at her side as she makes her word choices, alters the placement of lines, and adjusts her punctuation. Not only is all this compositional process described, it is also displayed in several plates so that we can see for ourselves what Plath did to her incessantly revised pages.To provide some idea of Plath’s meticulous pertinacity, I will concentrate on 1949, when she is not yet 20-years-old. In that year, she writes 18 poems, six of which she never submits for publication. Only two are published, with the others rejected by Seventeen, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor.At Smith College, Plath said she could have papered her dorm room with rejection slips, yet she remained undaunted, already understanding that it took time to make a breakthrough. At Smith, she studied the Stoics and abided by their watchwords — self-control and resilience. References to her efforts to behave stoically occur throughout her journals and correspondence.Although it is often supposed that husband Ted Hughes steadied Plath and even propped her up, it was Plath, he acknowledged, who made him a professional writer. In fact, I’d say she hardened him, because until he met her he was a dilettante, content to talk about poetry but only daring to share most of it with adoring girlfriends and fanboys. That wouldn’t do, and Plath told him why, typing up his work and submitting it to editors he did not know how to contact.Near the end of 1949, that year of rejections, Plath wrote “The Stoic,” and submitted it first to Seventeen and then to the Ladies’ Home Journal, without success. This poem that is not discussed in Plath biographies provides a remarkable insight into the young poet. The setting is a windy, rainy, and chilly night as seen from a “moonlit house,” by a poet who sees in the elements symbols of a “lover’s broken vows.” Some other day, she muses, the scene might have appealed to her, and eased her “grieving heart,” her “melting misery.” But so what about the weather? she suddenly declares: “I’m sure my new love will / Be true for hours and hours.”The Stoic seems to chide the Romantic in that line, but playfully, as the tears are “stored away,” and the poet confesses “No doubt I will be / needing them . . .”That is where the poem originally ended, we now know thanks to the editors. For publication, Plath rearranged the lines to include an ellipsis, plus a period, to make a full stop:No doubt I will be needingThem . . . . tomorrow.The tears and tomorrow get their own separate lines, with the last word dropping out of the poem like an afterthought, uncapitalized as in certain E. E. Cummings poems, and in some of Plath’s correspondence that favored the lower case.Plath had read “Gone With the Wind” several times, so I can’t help thinking of Scarlett O’Hara’s refrain: “Tomorrow is another day.” The speaker of the poem is a persona of the poet, a very self-aware writer having fun with herself and her subject matter, however serious her state of mind may be.For all the rejections, writing was its own reward, with the revising of words and lines tantamount to a constant regrouping of the self that still makes Sylvia Plath such a perpetual fascination to herself and to so much of the world.Mr. Rollyson’s forthcoming ‘Searching For Sylvia’ collects his essays, podcasts, and interviews with Plath biographers and novelists inspired by her life and work.

Sylvia Plath and the Art That Flows From Rejection

Sylvia Plath and the Art That Flows From Rejection

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