ESSAY
An Art Like Everything Else
By ERICA JONGIN The New Yorker of Aug. 3, 1963, a remarkable sequence of poems appeared, by a dead poet whose name was not yet familiar but whose voice sounded like no other. Under these poems was the attribution: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Since Mr. Shawn's New Yorker carried no contributors' notes, readers had no idea who wrote these astonishing poems; but the ominous double dates confirmed that she had gone like Alcestis to the land of the dead.
The sequence began with ''Two Campers in Cloud Country'' and ended with ''The Moon and the Yew Tree'':
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God. . . .
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
No one reading these poems could doubt that their author was more than ''half in love with easeful death,'' as Keats had it. But then young poets are always in love with death and in love with love. This one died at 31.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of stars.
. . .
And the message of the yew trees is blackness -- blackness and silence.
The impact is almost unimaginable now. In 1963 we still had a literary culture. Reading poems to oneself was not as rare as it is today (for all the poetry slams and hip-hop). To young women who wrote, this work was galvanizing. Sylvia, whoever she was, had a fully evolved voice. It wasn't wry and reeking of the bittersweet 1920's like Dorothy Parker's or romantic-ironic-transcendentalist like Edna St. Vincent Millay's. Perhaps some of its confessional candor was nudged by Robert Lowell. Perhaps Anne Sexton had contributed something of her own dark menstrual madness. The voice wasn't influenced by the hymnal rhythms of Emily Dickinson's meditations on death and love. It was something unto itself.
The poems were hypnotic, as Lowell later said in his introduction to ''Ariel'' (which appeared in 1965 in England, 1966 here). They were unapologetically female. An Amazon wrote them riding bareback. She had cut off one breast and dipped her quill in her blood. We would never know precisely why she killed herself. Nor could we ask.
Why did she die? Who was responsible? How could she have left these driven, hurtling lines and, as we later learned, two helpless children? What did her husband, the rugged Heathcliffian poet Ted Hughes, have to do with it? He was her executor, the father of Frieda and Nicholas (to whom this book, her second, was dedicated).
It's hard to convey Plath's power without first giving you a thumbnail sketch of those times. For my generation (which graduated from college in the mid-60's, before the 60's became ''The Sixties''), poetry was a mandrake root-male, a large gnarled phallus buried in the earth. Pull it out. Its virility was unmistakable. Female writers didn't exist on our critical radar except to be mocked. Theodore Roethke, a wonderful poet, complained of our tendency ''to stamp a tiny foot'' against God. Anatole Broyard, the writer and critic, told my writing class at Barnard we hadn't the sort of experiences that made writers. We didn't get drunk at bars in Pigalle or pick up hookers in seedy Left Bank hotels or run with the bulls in Pamplona. Our lives were too circumscribed. We didn't drink enough. (Not yet, anyway.) We didn't puke in the street. (Not yet, anyway.) We were ''doomed'' to be future mothers. Domesticated animals, future wives (many times over as it turned out), we didn't ride the painted bus with Neal Cassady, or chant Blake with Ginsberg or even poach on Barnard girls as Broyard did. We were too ladylike.
In college, we passionate future writers studied Blake, Keats, Byron, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert Browning, et cetera. Yes, we knew there was a Mrs. Browning, but hadn't she only written one treacly poem -- ''How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,'' wasn't it? Emily Dickinson lurked in Butler Library in something called the ''American Men of Letters'' series. Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom we had pored over as teenagers, was not on the Barnard syllabus. Dorothy Parker, whom we adored as teenagers, was deemed a light versifier. In fact the era of suffragists and flappers -- our grandmothers' generation -- occasionally surfaced as social history, but mostly it was invisible, as was its message that free women could change the world. Later we would call that generation the First Wave and ourselves the Second Wave. Much later; first we would have to ride our own wave to believe in ourselves as writers.
Sylvia Plath's extraordinary voice was the first surge of that wave. Though death-bound, it was already exultant. ''Hardly a woman at all, certainly not another 'poetess' but one of those . . . great classical heroines,'' Lowell wrote. ''These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'' We had found our 60's Sappho -- just after she leapt from the Leucadian cliff.
Now the brilliant, bipolar Lowell is dead and so is the fierce, sexy Ted Hughes with his vampirish warlock appeal. He tried it on me full force when we briefly met in 1971 after his publication-day reading of ''Crow.'' He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia's ghost kept me from being seduced. Now the children he raised are grown. Frieda is a painter and poet who somehow survived her childhood. She gets to tell her mother's tale, as is only right.
The edition of ''Ariel'' published by her father was not identical to the manuscript her mother left, so at her publisher's suggestion Frieda resurrected that manuscript, even giving us facsimiles of the poems in typed and handwritten form (ARIEL: The Restored Edition, HarperCollins, $24.95). We immediately see that Plath nearly called her second collection ''Daddy and other poems'' instead of ''Ariel.'' We feel Frieda Hughes's restraint in trying to be fair to both parents yet tell the truth as she sees it. ''My father had a profound respect for my mother's work in spite of being one of the subjects of its fury,'' she writes.
The reticence of the dutiful daughter (Frieda is in her mid-40's) trying to make sense of her family history is riveting. Frieda still wants to bring her parents back together again; all children of ruptured love stories want to. She speaks of the distortion of Plath's character and work by strangers and in her stunning self-control you feel her pain. ''The collection of the Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father,'' she calmly says.
The reference, clearly, is to self-appointed defenders of Sylvia Plath who never knew her or Hughes, perhaps never even read their work. Plath's gravestone in Yorkshire was often defaced to obliterate ''Hughes.'' What a child named Hughes might make of this we can only guess. ''Criticism of my father was even leveled at his ownership of my mother's copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me,'' Frieda notes. ''My father's editing of 'Ariel' was seen to 'interfere' with the sanctity of my mother's suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous. . . . I did not want my mother's death to be commemorated as if it had won an award. I wanted her life to be celebrated.''
I once took the brunt of the Plath industry's assault myself. Talking about her poetry and suicide at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in 1971, I was picketed by an angry posse because I refused to mouth the feminist orthodoxy of the time, that Hughes had murdered Plath. That Plath had a history of breakdowns in her college years was of no interest. They wanted to believe that a cruel husband done 'er in, whatever the ''facts.''
And the facts were hard to come by. Ted Hughes was shellshocked himself, and wanted to hide. He was also in love with the poet Assia Guttman Wevill, who committed suicide in 1969; their daughter died with her. Her suicide is often thought of as a copycat act (indeed, the method was the same), but it should also be pointed out that Assia was the child of Holocaust survivors, a group at high risk of suicide. Aurelia Schober Plath, Sylvia's mother, felt angry and betrayed by both Sylvia and Ted, but loved her grandchildren. Olywn Hughes, the children's aunt, was called back from her life in France to help raise them. They were miraculously alive, after all, and Sylvia was dead. What would you do?
So the Hugheses walled off. They declined to let anyone reprint Plath, set Plath to music, novelize Plath, perform Plath, except under their strict supervision. Two years ago the Manhattan Theatre Club asked me to present a Plath poetry evening and the Hugheses refused to give permission for a reading of the poems by actors. Maybe they were constrained by other contracts, but where openness was wanted, they closed down. And they're still careful. The Plath sanctuary remains guarded, now with the help of Frieda, who has complained about the film version of her mother's life and who wrote in a poem of her own, in the book ''Wooroloo'' (1998): ''Wanting to breathe life into their own dead babies / . . . They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw / And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls / To speak with her voice.''
Frieda Hughes has had the courage to bring her mother back, not as a symbol, but as a poet. Her poems are here and will have the last word. They remain remarkable. Their time has not passed. The new generations who read them may not care about their biographical underpinnings the way we did in the 60's, but they will care about their strength and craft.
WE can see in this new edition what a careful constructor of poems Plath was. She weighed her commas and semicolons. She cared about what Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg used to call ''breath units.'' She must have read her poems aloud to hear them in the air.
It is touching that they were mostly written at four in the morning -- ''that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby's cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles,'' as Plath put it for the BBC two months before she died for a program that was never broadcast. ''If they have anything else in common, perhaps it is that they are written for the ear, not the eye: They are poems written out loud.'' I adopted this habit too, when my daughter was an infant. I love that sky blue-pink hour, do my best writing then and read what I'm writing aloud to myself, especially poetry.
So ''Ariel: The Restored Edition'' is illuminating. I only wish Frieda Hughes and HarperCollins had included a recording of Plath's last reading for the BBC, in 1962. You can hear all the colors of her kaleidoscopic voices, unstilled and unblanched by the grave-cave.
Erica Jong, the author of seven volumes of poetry, also wrote ''Fear of Flying.''
Correction: January 9, 2005, Sunday:
An essay on Dec. 12 about Sylvia Plath misstated her age at her death. She was 30, not 31.
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