‘Silence of another order’: Negativity and trope in the late poems of Sylvia Plath
Authors
Emma Jones
Abstract
Sylvia Plath is a negative poet. This, I think, few would deny. The popular conception of Plath as the depressed poet par excellence has made her a fantasized conduit of the death-drive. Plath as the word-made-death involves her readers in a drama where poetry-as-logos impels her participants to death-as-telos. In such a reading the poems enact a drama in which she plays the wronged, vengeful, and ultimately self-liberated heroine. The negativity of death aids the triumph of rebirth. This is the theme of the textual drama that is Ariel.
Such a view represents a reading that is all too common in Plath criticism. Its increasing contestation has seen numerous useful analyses of Sylvia Plath as a mythic figure in cultural consciousness, a myth that crosses the usual boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture.
The University of Sydney acknowledges that its campuses and facilities sit on the ancestral lands of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have for thousands of generations exchanged knowledge for the benefit of all.
Learn more