Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts, The

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 2005 by Levin, Dana

THIS IS THE FIKST OF A THREE-PART COLUMN that will explore the relationship between pressure-psychological, societal and aesthetic-and the development of poetic style. Just as a diamond is coal's response to the press of the earth, in its broadest terms a style is an aesthetic response to being an individual in the grip of the world. Unique and indelible styles often anse out of great personal trial and sometimes at great cost: hence the 'heroics' of the title. By these lights, the author views style as a product of friction and resistance.

Part two will focus on the Homeric simile; part three will examine Originality' and the younger poet.

Part 1: Plath's "I am"

I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, or being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.

-Sylvia Plath, 1962(1)

The qualities of the hero are in general well known, but certainly complacency is not one of them.

Among its many contemporary shadings, to be 'complacent' is to placidly accept Status Quo'complacent,' from the Latin 'complacere': to be very pleasing.

The hero does not aim to please. The hero confronts and resists. The hero is fearless: power and agency are her attributes.

The hero is the simple declarative sentence.

I want to begin with Maenad, composed soon after Plath's 27th birthday, three years before her suicide in February 1963:

Once I was ordinary:

Sat by my father's bean tree

Eating the fingers of wisdom.

The birds made milk.

When it thundered I hid under a flat stone.

The mother of mouths didn't love me.

The old man shrank to a doll.

O I am too big to go backward:

Birdmilk is feathers,

The bean leaves are dumb as hands.

This month is fit for little.

The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.

A red tongue is among us.

Mother, keep out of my barnyard,

I am becoming another.

Dog-head, devourer:

Feed me the berries of dark.

The lids won't shut. Time

Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun

Its endless glitter.

I must swallow it all.

Lady, who are these others in the moon's vat

Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?

In this light the blood is black.

Tell me my name.2

The poem chronicles a transformation: mother and father, once large and primary, have receded -the old man has shrunk to a doll, his wisdom now "dumb as hands"; the "mother of mouths" is greeted with a threat. There is lament, maybe even fear, in the speaker's declaration "O I am too big to go backward." The poem displays all the earmarks of burgeoning adolescence, the first dawning of an identity outside childhood; in this, the speaker is indeed "ordinary." But who is she becoming? Too big now to hide under the "flat stone," the speaker finds herself in a world where the dead "ripen" and "lids won't shut," suggesting that she must unflinchingly confront some horror attached to "becoming another." "Tell me my name," she pleads at the end of the poem, as if a defined identity will somehow quell her terror. Yet as the title, Maenad, tells us, the speaker has every right to fear this new self who demands to be fed "the berries of dark."

"Tell me my name" is the plea driving both the development of Plath's self-identity and the development of her poetic style, for the two are not separate. Yet even thirty years after her death, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in discussing critical responses to Plath's work, state:

Few consider the connection between the poetic influences that shaped Plath's style and the personal dilemma that became her subject. . . few speculate on what it meant to be a woman born in America in 1932, reading and trying to write major poetry ... 3

It is easy enough to imagine the pressures any American woman faced coming of age in the 1950's. By now, all one must say is "June Cleaver" or "Father Knows Best" to get the cultural gist. While I will make some forays into the social context of Plath's life, what is more pertinent to me is how Plath both absorbed and resisted this context: as her style develops, it is shaped by a struggle to overcome the forces of literary heritage, societal expectation, even biological destiny.

"I am afraid of getting older," Plath writes in 1949, at the age of seventeen. "I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day. Spare me the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free ... I want, I think, to be omniscient ... I think I would like to call myself The girl who wanted to be God.' Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be-perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I-I am powerful-but to what extent? I am I."4

"I am I": nameless, genderless, echoing the great I AM that heralds God's revelation-the journals Plath kept through late adolescence are replete with such cries for freedom of being and how her place as a woman denies it. "Being born a woman is my tragedy," she writes two years later. "My consuming desire ... to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording-all is spoiled by the fact that I am ... a female always in danger ... yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night ..."5