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In which John Green teaches you about the poetry of Sylvia Plath. When a lot of people think about Sylvia Plath, they think about her struggles with mental illness and her eventual suicide. Her actual work can get lost in the shuffle a bit, so this video really tries to focus on the poetry. You’ll learn about Sylvia Plath’s role as a feminist poet, and you’ll also learn about her extraordinary ability to recreate the experiences of real life in beautiful and relatable way.
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
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Hi, I’m John Green. This is Crash Course Literature.
00:02
And today we’re going to talk about the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
00:05
Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Ugh, I heard she’s like the patron saint of sad teenage girls.
00:09
Well, me from the past, once again you’re prejudging an author based on what you’ve
00:12
heard rather than what you’ve actually read. I know this, because I used to be you, and
00:17
I am keenly aware of the fact that you have not actually read Sylvia Plath.
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So, let’s actually read some poems before trying to convince everyone about how smart we are.
00:25
[Theme Music]
00:34
So, Sylvia Plath is often described as a feminist poet, writing about the plight of women before
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women’s rights were a mainstream idea. Like, essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote “At her brutal
00:43
best — and Plath is a brutal poet — she taps a source of power that transforms her poetic
00:49
voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.”
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And you though the Hulk was the only raving avenger. No, there is also ‘The Plath!’
00:57
And there is no question that Plath’s feminism is extremely important to her poetry, but she also wrote
01:02
about a lot of day-to-day experiences and made them significant through her use of metaphor and simile.
01:07
Former American poet laureate Robert Pinsky said her poems “throw off images and phrases
01:12
with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its throttle stuck wide open.”
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Like, here’s part of her poem “Cut,” which she wrote about cutting her thumb while cooking.
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“What a thrill — My thumb instead of an onion.
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The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hinge
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Of skin, A flap like a hat,
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Dead white. Then that red plush.”
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So, she takes a commonplace experience and turns it into something more, and that’s one
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of the hallmarks of a great poem. You can relate to it even though you’ve never considered
01:40
the particular subject in that particular way. Like, you understand how she’s cut herself,
01:46
and you can picture the piece of skin like a hat or a scalp on her finger. You know what
01:50
the red plush looks like and the dead white, and you can almost feel it.
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But while you can relate to it, the imagery is also sort of disorienting. I mean this
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is a poem that begins “What a thrill.” And I think some of us can relate to that feeling
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that injury or destruction can be kind of thrilling. It’s not a healthy thing; it’s
02:06
not something we want to romanticize, but it is true.
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So, let’s talk about Sylvia Plath’s biography in the ‘Thought Bubble.’ Plath was born in
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1932 in Boston. Her father was an entomologist and wrote a book about bees, which would be
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the subject of many of Plath’s later poems. Her mom was a first generation American pursing
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a master’s in teaching when she met Plath’s father. Sylvia published her first poem at
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the age of eight. Her father died that same year.
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She was a good student and attended Smith College and was awarded a summer internship
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at Mademoiselle Magazine. The internship was the inspiration for her wonderful novel The
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Bell Jar. She said she looked back at the experience as though looking through a bell
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jar, which distorted it into a work of fiction.
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The book tells us the tale of a woman who finds herself unable to enjoy her summer in
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the city and all the perks that come with her internship. When she returns home, her
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mother sees her depression and takes her to a doctor, who treats her extensively with
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electric shock therapy. She continues to get worse until a benefactor pays for her to go
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to a private hospital where she is treated appropriately and gets well enough to leave
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the hospital and go back to school.
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In real life, Plath’s first suicide attempt was in 1953. She crawled underneath her house
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and took her mother’s sleeping pills and said later that she was “blissfully succumbed to
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the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion.”
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But she survived at graduated from Smith and then went on to win a Fulbright scholarship
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to study at the University of Cambridge where she met Ted Hughes, a poet whose work she
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admired. They married a few months later and found a mutual interest in astrology and the
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supernatural and a mutual admiration for each other’s work.
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In 1962, Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair and they separated.
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Later that year, she experienced a creative burst and wrote a book’s worth of poems. And then,
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in February of 1963, she took her own life. She was only 30.
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Thanks, Thought Bubble. Oh, it must be time for the open letter! Abe Lincoln?!
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All right, an open letter to suicide. Dear Suicide, you are a permanent response to a temporary
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problem, and you are a solution to nothing. I just want to say that at the outset, there
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is nothing good or romantic about you, Suicide. You are a tragedy. You are also, in almost all cases, preventable.
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Abe Lincoln had periods of intense, paralyzing depression throughout his life, and he became
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the best president of the United States ever in history, except for Franklin Pierce. I’m
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kidding, Franklin Pierce. You were the worst.
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There is a correlation between depressive personalities and creativity, but people who
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are suffering from paralyzing depression don’t create anything.
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So, it’s very important to me when we talk about a writer whose life ended with suicide
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that we note that people survive depression. And also that Sylvia Plath wasn’t a good writer,
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because she eventually committed suicide. In fact, her career was cut short and I mourn
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all of the many wonderful books we might’ve had.
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In short, Suicide, I don’t like to say mean things, but you suck. Best wishes, John Green.
04:49
Okay, so Sylvia Plath became the first person to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
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for her book The Collected Poems, published in 1981. But she’s best known for Ariel, a collection
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of poems written in something of a poetic frenzy in the months before she died, and published in 1965.
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Robert Penn Warren called Ariel “a unique book, it scarcely seems a book at all, rather
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a keen, cold gust of reality as though somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night.”
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In the introduction to Ariel, Robert Lowell says that in this book “…Plath becomes herself…everything
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we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head. The voice is now cooly amused,
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witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire.”
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So here are a couple excerpts from one of Plath’s most famous poems, Lady Lazarus.
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You can hear me read the whole thing here.
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“Dying Is an art, like everything else.
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I do it exceptionally well.
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I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.
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I guess you could say I’ve a call.
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It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
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It’s the theatrical
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Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same
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brute Amused shout:
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‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out.”
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“Out of the ash I rise with my red hair
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And I eat men like air.”
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The poem is brutal, and angry, and morbid. It involves a lot of corpses. But it’s also
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a poem of empowerment, and in a weird way, it’s kind of hopeful. It’s the kind of hard,
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one hope that you can take with you no matter how difficult things get.
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Lazarus, of course, refers to the Bible story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. She’s
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imagining herself as rising from the dead, because she lived through a suicide attempt.
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And throughout the poem, she uses repetition and rhyme so that you can’t look away from
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these things that are difficult to face. Every time your mind starts to wander, there’s a
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rhyme that sucks you back in.
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And then there are the line breaks, which are really fascinating in this poem. So, when
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I was a kid, I though that you look a three or four second pause at the end of every line of poetry.
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And that may be the case in many Shel Silverstein poems, but it’s definitely not the case in many Sylvia Plath poems.
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Now, like when proper poets read from their poetry, they read it all so slowly that they
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can afford to take a full breath at the end of each line. But you should treat a line
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break as some kind of punctuation, like maybe it reads as a comma. Maybe it just means there’s
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a stronger emphasis on the word before or after the line break.
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One of the pleasures of reading poetry for me is that I kind of get to be the co-creator
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of the poem by making choices about how to read it.
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Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal once that she felt as though she lived two extremes:
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“joyous positive and despairing negative.” And we see both in her poems. Like in “Letter
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in November,” she gives us a glimpse of the joyous positive.
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“…I am flushed and warm. I think I may be enormous,
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I am so stupidly happy…”
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And we’ve all felt puffed up with happiness, and she finds brilliant words to describe
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the feeling just as it is, but I also think there’s something else going on here.
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There’s a longstanding idea that women should be quiet and small, right? Like when I’m on
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an airplane, men usually sit like blueergh, and God forbid if a woman takes an armrest on an plane!
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Anyway, in that sense, allowing yourself to become enormous with happiness is a kind of
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countercultural action. Instead of enormity being, like, ‘unwomanly,’ it becomes the perfect
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and most wonderful thing for a woman to be.
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So, Sylvia Plath was influenced by writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence,
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but also by Emily Dickinson. And if you watched our episode on Dickinson last year, you’ll see that influence.
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They both share a preoccupation with death, but they also both write from the perspective
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of women who find themselves trapped by lack of opportunity.
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So along poets like Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, Plath is often seen as a member of
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the ‘Confessional School of Poetry.’ This so-called poetry of the ‘I’ dealt directly
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with trauma and with relationships, and these poems were often autobiographical.
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But vitally, they weren’t just recording their emotions on paper and then just inserting
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line breaks and rhymes. Confessional poetry isn’t just about capturing the ‘self’, it’s
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also a kind of remaking the ‘self’.
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That’s one of the great things about writing. And “Lady Lazarus” is actually a really good
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example of this. I mean, in that poem, the narrator dies, but then is slowly reformed.
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The last poem I want to talk about today is “Tulips,” the poem that was included in Ariel,
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although though it was written much earlier than most of the poems in the book. It was
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about a hospital stay in which she was recovering from an appendectomy.
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“The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
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Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
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I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
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As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
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I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
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And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
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They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
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Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
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Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.”
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For me, this idea of “two white lids that will not shut” is central to my understanding
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of humanity and our ineradicable hope.
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Plath is trying to give up and just lie still in the absolute white, but those two exciting
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tulips are pulling her back into the world.
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Everything is white and quiet and snowed-in, but those tulips, we read, are “too red…they hurt me.”
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This poem, for me at least, captures the difficulty of being a person, but also what’s rewarding about being a person.
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We are called to attentiveness even when it’s painful.
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I think Sylvia Plath often gets a bad rap precisely because her poetry resonates with teenagers.
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And I think it’s a little bit unfair. Yes, there are times when she romanticizes
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death and self-injury, and I don’t like it when she does that.
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But there is astonishing emotional authenticity in her poems, and she manages it without irony.
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And that incredible frankness in Plath’s writing is what I think makes it endure. It all feels true.
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Her focused observation of the world around her, the pupil that has to take everything
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in, that was a great gift to us because by keeping her eyes open as long as she did,
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she helped us to keep ours open. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next week.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.