The Colossus

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Guardian (Manchester, England), August 18, 2001, Christina Patterson, "Ted on Sylvia, for the Record," p. R3. The reason I mention this occasion is that as much as I wanted to understand Sylvia Plath, this book of poetry only became accessible once I began to understand Linda's ability to open herself to others. Plath bared herself in a way in which I not only felt awkward and shy, but with a power that initially made me feel like I was sitting too close to the stage, as it were. Here was a woman who wrote without any apology for who she was. In my estimation she offended the very ones who felt obliged to judge and evaluate her. The statue, which is based on a real creation from Rhodes in 280 BC, is in ruins. The speaker is a caretaker of sorts. She tends to the statue, sometimes expressing irritation or exasperation with it and other times relishing in its presence. As the poem progresses it becomes clear that the poet is using this caretaker/deceased statue relationship to depict her own relationship to her deceased father. Despite the fact that the boat’s keel is never going to scrape on the shore, she still curls up in the statue’s ear and takes in his presence. Newman, Charles, editor, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1970. Editor) American Poetry Now (supplement number 2 to Critical Quarterly,) Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1961.

Haberkamp, Frederike, Sylvia Plath: The Poetics of Beekeeping, International Specialised Book Services, 1997.The eighteenth line of the poem contains another simile. She tells him that he is “pithy and historical as the Roman Forum”. This is yet another ruin and another of a classical nature. The use of the word “pithy” in this line is curious. It’s not entirely clear why Plath chose to use it, but one might speculate that it has to do with the larger metaphor. The Forum might be a “pithy” way of describing her father/the statue.

Observer, June 1, 1986; February 18, 1996; March 19, 2000, Kate Kellaway, "The Poet Who Died So Well," p. 21. I find Plath's poetry at times to be beautiful and arresting, but more often than not in this collection I was either bored or bemused. Plath uses a great deal of metaphor in her poems, but to me it was not always that clear exactly what images she was trying to convey, which affected my ability to enjoy them and 'read into them'. Instead I just found them quite verbose at points. New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3. In the first few stanzas, Plath seems exasperated with her father’s monumentality, expressing her fear that she “shall never get [him] put together entirely.” Further, she is dismissive of what she perceives as smugness in his desire to be an oracle, when all he can produce is unpleasant animal noise. Considering the emotions at display here, it is unclear why she would bother to scale the statue. Stevenson, Anne, Bitter Fame: The Undiscovered Life of Sylvia Plath, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1989.

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Axelrod, Steven Gould, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1990. Bundtzen also interprets the poem through a feminist lens. She sees it as an illumination of "woman's psyche as it is shaped by a patriarchal culture." She cites Plath's many allusions - to the Oresteia and Greek tragedy - to suggest that the speaker is conflicted about having to exist in the shadow of a father figure, while remaining desperate for it to speak to her. She is unable to declare her individuality in this context, and yet cannot muster the strength to make a change. From this perspective, the poem offers a more universal critique, rather than merely exploring the author's personal past. The strange psyche at the core of these poems is made powerful by its seemingly limitless ability to endure self-destruction. But before the destruction, we get to watch Plath begin to become a great poet. Most poets slowly edge their way, poem by poem then book by book, to their major work. Plath got there in a couple of bursts — first here in The Colossus, then a few years later in the months before she died when she wrote much of what would become Ariel. As tragic and dark as her end would be, it's nonetheless thrilling to watch this great artist becoming herself. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. The poems are too rich, too sensual and filling. It was like trying to eat a plateful of prime rib, that's been covered in dark chocolate and deep fried. Delicious, but.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.

Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. I fell into Plath's spell on several occasions during my freshman year. In many ways, I felt a strange discontinuity in my life when I read her, as if what I was studying in class had little to do with the life force struggling to live and burst forth from the earth. One was in my head and the other permeated everything else inside me.

In Plath’s final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia Plath,“death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because there is no longer dialogue, no sense of ‘Otherness’—she is speaking from a viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows as much as the Eye sees.” Alvarez believed that “the very source of [Plath’s] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost.” Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990. Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2000, Marjorie Miller, "Sylvia Plath's Uncensored Journals, to Be Published in April, Shed Light on Her Dark Moods and Tumultuous Marriage," p. A2.Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1971, Random House (New York, NY), 1972. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 17, 1981; Volume 50, 1988; Volume 51, 1989. Critical Survey, September, 2000, James Booth, "Competing Pulses: Secular and Sacred in Hughes, Larkin, and Plath," p. 3.