Given that I had been triggered again into examining the purpose of poetry, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath.
Over summer I realised that I could not even begin to make any impression upon the problem Plath’s poetry poses for me without dragging at least two other poets into the mix. One is Robert Hayden some of whose various styles and powerful themes provide illuminating points of comparison with Plath, and the other is Charlotte Mew, to whose poetry I resonate strongly, more even than to Hayden’s, who was following the Bahá’í path as I am now, whereas she is at best a sceptic and often an unbeliever.
Both though appeal to me in ways that Plath simply does not for reasons which are rooted in Iain McGilchrist’s belief that the most important truths cannot be explained in prose, something which, as we will see over the next two posts, in my view places a heavy burden of responsibility on the poet to transcend a simplistic subjectivity. We will need carefully to consider how elevation (rising above purely material things) is not the same as escalation (being carried away by our reactions to things). Plath escalates: Hayden elevates.
The Purpose of Poetry
Hatcher’s sense of the purpose of poetry, derived in some measure from his study of the poetry of Robert Hayden, falls into two categories – a warning and an overriding goal.
The warning immediately resonates with the sense I have of Plath’s most powerful and widely read poems. It concerns what I have labelled haemorrhaging hurt. Hatcher is clear that[1] ‘. . . it was never Hayden’s purpose to use his poetry to bleed on his pages or to condemn others.’ He quotes Gwendolyn Brooks as defining two sorts of poets:[2]
one who ‘mixes with mud’ and writes in the midst of feeling, ‘his wounds like faucets above his page’, and a second sort of poet who ‘is amenable to a clarifying enchantment via the power of Art’, who has a ‘reverence for the word Art’, who, in effect, is more studied, more analytical. She goes on to say that while we need both sorts, Hayden is clearly the latter.
Maybe we do need both, but maybe they are not of equal value. More on that later. Back to haemorrhaging for now and how deal with painful issues more effectively.
The key point Hatcher emphasises is that[3] ‘Gwendolyn Brooks . . . rightly distinguished Hayden’s art from the “bare-fight boys”, poets who pour out raw emotion, their “wounds like faucets above his page.”’
In discussing Hayden’s poem The Lion Hatcher unpacks one important characteristic of successful pain management in poetry:[4]
. . . This poem distinguishes between the unconscious self, in its primitive anger and uncontrolled raw emotions, and the conscious artist who enters the cage of self to control and channel that raw emotion and insight into intelligible pattern and form.
We are back here somewhere in Myers territory and the handling of ‘subliminal uprush.’ Myers uses Blake as an example ‘of strong imagination insufficiently controlled by supraliminal discipline: “throughout all the work of William Blake we see the subliminal self flashing for moments into unity, then smouldering again in a lurid and scattered glow”.’
Hayden makes explicit reference, as Plath does, to the Holocaust but in a far more justifiable way, as Hatcher explains:[5]
[H]e sees in the concentration camp victims the faces of his childhood playmates and in the racism of South Africa’s apartheid and the violence of the Korean War evidence that the evils he has chronicled are neither finished nor peculiarly American.
Not only were the atrocities of slavery commensurate with the genocide of the death camps, but also, as John Fitzgerald Medina explores in Faith, Physics & Psychology the parallels between slavery and the Holocaust are not accidental because Hitler learned a great deal from the United States to help him launch his extermination campaigns. Linking them poetically is therefore, in my view, completely valid, in this case, but not in Plath’s, where her childhood experiences are not remotely comparable to either slavery or genocide.
Whereas Plath was described at times as a ‘confessional poet,’ a label that might seem to justify more than a touch of self-dramatisation, Hatcher makes it clear that such a description does not apply to Hayden.[6] Though ‘he is an artist watching himself, gauging those emotions, studying how his own grief relates to a grieving age’ as ‘John Wright observed . . . even here Hayden was not a confessional poet,’ in that ‘with words at least, he wore the mask, and won in wearing it the detached control and objectivity without which poetic marvels like his most widely acclaimed poem, “Middle Passage”, would not have been possible.’ Hayden recognised[7] a ‘need [for the poet] to distance himself from emotionality in order to deal with the emotion itself’ and quotes Hayden to demonstrate the point:
At first, I was emotionally involved with my subject, but as I continued working I began to feel detached. I might very well have produced nothing but sentimental twaddle otherwise. . . . [T]he expression of a strong emotion becomes the means of release from that emotion.
He also refers to T. S. Eliot who stated, ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’
This is the opposite of what Plath seems to be doing. I will be looking more closely at specific poems in due course but feel it important to explain in some detail how Robert Hayden has helped me develop a barometer by which I feel I have been able effectively to test the weather of at least one of Plath’s most famous and powerful poems.
An important point comes from Hatcher’s quotation from Wilburn Williams, Jr.’s study of Angle of Ascent:[8] Hayden had the capacity to ‘Objectivise his own subjectivity. His private anguish never locks him into the sterile dead-end of solipsism; it impels him outward into the world.’
He marshals a statistic in support of his case:[9]
It is appropriate, therefore, that while in over twenty poems Hayden used an image of night or darkness to represent this period [in human history], in only two is there no light, no glimmer of hope.
So, we now need to move onto the second category of the overriding goal:[10]
Hayden affirmed the essential relationship between poetry and man’s desire for transcendence: ‘if there exists a “poetry of despair” and rejection, there is also a poetry that affirms the humane and spiritual.’
We will need to address the question at some point of whether a poetry of pure despair is of equal value to a more affirmative form. For now though I need to examine in more detail how poetry and transcendence can be related.
Poetry and Transcendence
This is where things get somewhat more complicated, but, given that some of Plath’s poetry is allusive to the point of relative obscurity, it seems important to explore some criteria to help us determine whether all the effort expended in mining for meaning in a poem is justified by the level of significance.
At the simplest level it suggests that, to clear this hurdle, a poem will need to transcend the superficially obvious and merely subjective. But what might that mean in practice?
Hatcher’s analysis of this problem hinges around the matter of metaphor and symbol. In reference to Hayden’s poetry he feels that[11] ‘as symbolic pieces they often reach far beyond the sometimes beguilingly accessible surfaces,’ ‘courageously’ probing[12] ‘his innermost being,’ and conferring upon the reader ‘the obligation . . . to infer meaning through the algebraic process of working through poetic images.’
That would not be enough in itself, though, to fully meet his criterion[13] as he explains that Hayden does not indulge in ‘some of the solipsistic modes so evident in much of post-modern poetry in which the self is the centre of the universe around which all other realities orbit . . . always the focus of Hayden’s work is outward, expansive, examining the larger implications of even the most personal events.’
When we look later at how Plath suborns larger events of great significance to her own narrower subjective purpose we can see the distance between them.
Hatcher argues that Hayden, according to Watkins, is trying to reach for[14] ‘the meaning behind the surfaces of events, of people, of nature itself,’ and, according to Gene Olson, as with other writers, needing ‘to live twice, to “complete” the experience by distilling it on paper.’
Basically, perhaps in the best summary, Hayden’s output resists reduction:[15]
Auden’s notion of poetry as a process of solving for the unknown is something that Hayden will inevitably mention as an essential key to his poetics. . . . ‘You are trying to say what cannot be said any other way – and, in some poems, you are trying to say what really cannot be said at all.’ . . . Instead of telling the reader what to think, he employed symbols, metaphors, imagery, the persona and other devices to create an intimate relationship between the poem and the reader.
Moreover, in a way that eludes Plath, I feel, ‘He wished to be considered and adjudged as a poet, not a Black poet, not a Bahá’í poet, simply a poet,’ whereas Plath may have harboured ideas of herself as a victim, somehow principally representing women rather than humanity. That is in itself a valuable aim, but risks diminishing the reach and depth of the poetry, something I hope to come back to in due course.
There is a complex question hovering in the background, part of which I have touched on in previous posts, such as the ones discussing the work of Samuel Beckett.
Beckett’s view of the world of existence in his work is steeped in a meaningless bleakness which seems irremediable because he believes that’s all there is. There are no compensating forces.
Portrayed in other writers’ works, Conrad perhaps in Heart of Darkness for example, is a depth of darkness so warped the writer clearly believes it is totally unacceptable, even if effective remedies are not obvious within the text.
Jocelyn Baines, in his biography of Conrad, puts it well:[16]
[Heart of Darkness] shows how deeply he was an affected emotionally by the sight of such human baseness and degradation; . . . his Congo experience devastatingly exposes cleavage between human pretensions and practice, a consciousness which underlies Conrad’s philosophy of life.
Conrad was quite explicit that[17] what was happening in such places was ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human consciousness and geographical exploration.’
In the narrator, Marlowe’s words in the book itself, we find:[18]
They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
There is a disturbing caveat there: ‘as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness.’ The implication is that, although the behaviour of the Europeans is savage, the ‘darkness’ of Africa might be some kind of justification. The ‘wilderness’ is corrupting, the story seems to imply, and[19] in ‘a corrupt world one is bound to commit a corrupt act.’ The footnote Baines quotes from a letter in French expresses Conrad’s view at that point in time:
L’homme est un animal méchant. Le crime est une condition nécessaire de l’existence organisée. La societé est essentiellement criminelle. [Man is a wicked animal. Crime is an necessary condition of organised existence. Society is is essentially criminal.’]
As we can see from this, such a deep level of abhorrence for the evil of which humanity can be capable reduced even Conrad to Beckett’s level of bleak despair at times.
So, there may be an inevitable trap somewhere between the two where a writer is so convinced at the time of writing that the intense darkness of their subjective vision, rooted in their personal experience, is absolutely true, even if not for everyone, that it can still create a destructive climate of despair in the minds of others. The dark side of existence becomes all there is and even basic decency seems to disappear.
Plath seems to fall into the latter category.
The question is what is the relative value of works of art of this nature as against those such as Hayden’s that do not shirk the darkness but also have a clearer sense that there is light, given that it seems crucial that we do not lapse into despair in the face of all the challenges we currently have to meet.
That’s where we may be going next, if I do not get derailed in the attempt.
References:
[1]. (From the Auroral Darkness – page 26.
[2]. Op. Cit. – page 82.
[3]. Op. Cit. – page 142.
[4]. Op. Cit. – page 112.
[5]. Op. Cit. – page 121.
[6]. Op. Cit. – page 220.
[7]. Op. Cit. – page 247.
[8]. Op. Cit. – page 256.
[9]. Op. Cit. – page 277.
[10]. Op. Cit. – page 252.
[11]. Op. Cit. – page xii.
[12]. Op. Cit. – page 22.
[13]. Op. Cit. – page 27.
[14]. Op. Cit. – page 33.
[15]. Op. Cit. – page 70.
[16]. Joseph Conrad – page 119.
[17]. Op. Cit. – pages 112-13.
[18]. Heart of Darkness, Apple Books – pages 12-13.
[19]. Joseph Conrad – page 230.
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