Heroics of Style: A Study in Three Parts, The

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

By the end of this poem, the girl who wanted to be God gets her wish-of a kind. The problem hereand it is a psychological, not a poetic, problemis that the power Lady Lazarus has is not the power of one liberated from gender expectations-rather it is the power of rage writ large, all of it directed at the male figures she wishes to trump. While the show she puts on for the "Herrs" and "Doktors" of the peanut-crunching crowd is awesome and terrible, it is still/or them. The last threat simply contorts the wish of the young woman who wanted a man to eat her food and her body and her love.

Even at her most poetically empowered, it seems Plath could noifed that power outside the confines of the submission/dominance dynamic in which she was locked. Her sarcasm tells us this, for it is the poetic expression of outrage afflicted by doubt -the element that thwarts her hope for rebirth. Sarcasm accepts the prevailing power it seeks to diminish-it taunts, but does not fight. The increasing sarcasm in Plath's late work, as evidenced in Lady Lazarus and other late poems, suggests that Plath ultimately did not believe she could overcome the societal and personal forces that would keep her "destined to be classified and qualified." If the skeleton of a new self was available in the basic poetic building blocks of declarative syntax and metaphor, the emotions of that self, as expressed through tone, were not.

As we know, history is ironic. Plath's struggle for self-definition, and the style engendered by it, paved the way for a next generation of women poets to declare "I am" as necessary instruction and command. And, despite years of corrosive celebrity, her work retains emotive and aesthetic power. If from the perspective of psychology we can see Plath as a defeated figure, from the perspective of art she triumphed in achieving the one goal towards which all writers strive: life on the page.

NOTES

1. The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, Ed. Peter Orr.

2. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, p. 133.

3. Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, p. 271.

4. qtd in Gilbert and Gubar, p. 270.

5. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, P-77.

6. Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 276-77.

7. Journals, p. 201.

8. "Mirror," Collected Poems, p. 173.

9. One must also pose this in light of the often mocking or dissociated tone Plath brought to her poems about the domestic, from 'The Applicant" and "Lesbos" to "Morning Song." While Plath could, and did, find relief behind the apron, she wasn't comfortable there for long.

10. qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar, p. 273.

11. Journals, p. 360.

12. Journals, p. 223.

13. See also Gilbert and Gubar.

14. Collected Poems, pp. 170,173-74. It is interesting to note that these examples come from poems written in a one-month period in 1961: the need to transfigure is persistent indeed.

15. Collected Poems, p. 51.

16. Collected Poems, p. 224.

17. qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar, p. 289.

18. Journals, p. 381.