I bought this book from Amazon US in June 2006. The price was US$ 8.20. For years, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson have been my preferred American female poets.
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Sylvia Plath at Glance ... ...posthumously include Ariel (1965) and Crossing the Water (1971), both poetry collection, and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), a book of short stories and other prose. The Collected Poems, which includes many previously unpublished poems, appeared in 1981 and was awarded a Pulitzer Price.
More further details about Sylvia Plath also available at:
(1) www.sylviaplath.de
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath more
I bought this book from Amazon US in June 2006. The price was US$ 8.20. For years, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson have been my preferred American female poets.
************************** Sylvia Plath at Glance **************************
According to Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature (1995: 888), Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 - February 11, 1963) was an American poet whose best-known poems are carefully crafted pieces noted for their personal imagery and intense focus. Many concern such themes as alienation, death, and self-destruction. She was little known at the time of her death by suicide, but by the mid-1970s she was considered a major contemporary poet. Plath's major publication was The Colossus (1960), a collection of poems written from 1956 to 1960. This was followed by her only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), which first appeared under pseudonym. Drawn from Plath's own experiences, the book describes the mental breakdown, attempted suicide, and eventual recovery of a young college girl. Works published posthumously include Ariel (1965) and Crossing the Water (1971), both poetry collection, and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977), a book of short stories and other prose. The Collected Poems, which includes many previously unpublished poems, appeared in 1981 and was awarded a Pulitzer Price.
More further details about Sylvia Plath also available at: (1) www.sylviaplath.de (2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
************************ ************* Crossing the Waters: Contents *************************************
Crossing the Waters published 38 poems:
1. Wuthering Heights 2. Finisterre 3. Face Lift 4. Parliement Hill Fields 5. Heavy Woman 6. Insomniac 7. I am Vertical 8. Blackberrying 9. The Babysitters 10. In Plaster 11. Leaving Early 12. Stillborn 13. Private Ground 14. Widow 15. Candles 16. Magi 17. Love Letter 18. Small Hours 19. Sleep in the Mojave Desert 20. The Surgeon at 2 A.M. 21. Two Campers in Cloud Country 22. Mirror 23. On Deck 24. Whitsun 25. Zoo Keeper's Wife 26. Last Words 27. Black Rook in Rainy Weather 28. Metaphors 29. Maudlin 30. Ouija 31. Two Sisters of Persephone 32. Who 33. Dark House 34. Maenad 35. The Beast 36. Witch Burning 37. A Life 38. Crossing the Water
************************************** Disclosures from a Dark House **************************************
Most of poems in Crossing the Water demonstrate a kind of self-examination, evoking moments of puzzlement and hopeful resignation to the passage of time and imprisoning conditions of life. Sylvia Plath wrote her poems in her passionately mutinous language makes her fanciful and faltering inquiry into the condition of woman tight with poetic tension.
She wrote in 'Wuthering Heights' (p.1):
There is no life higher than the grasstops Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind Pours by like destiny, bending Everything in one direction.
A gender relation in matrimony is also a sadness subject in Sylvia Plath's poems. It's a sorrow with anger, despair, and dreadful inside. Emotions of sadness and sorrow of her poetry turns its face with steady consistency toward be defeated life. Life for Sylvia Plath is seemed always like a dark house.
She wrote in 'Dark House' (p. 50):
This is a dark house, very big. I made it myself, Cell by cell from a quite corner, Chewing at the grey paper, Oozing the glue drops, Whistling, wiggling my ears, Thinking of something else.
And in 'Face Lift' (p. 5) she wrote:
For five days I lie in secret, Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow. Even my best friend thinks I'm the country. … Broody and in long skirts of my first husband's sofa, my fingers Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle; I hadn't a cat yet.
Sylvia Plath perceives matrimony as an empty world, akin to feelings experienced by Sue, a main character in Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy's last novel, which focused on the themes of sex and marriage. It's also a melancholy and an unhappiness world for her.
She wrote in 'The Babysitters' (p. 14):
But I didn't know how to cook, and babies depressed me. Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.
A wider spectrum of the fragile life issues abounds in Sylvia's poems. Her uprising is very symbolic. She picks up on the word "tree" to symbolize the fragile life of I-lyric before of death.
She wrote in 'I'm Vertical' (p.12):
But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor I am the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. Compared with me, a tree is immortal….
********************* Sexual Ideology *********************
I-lyric in Sylvia's poems may remind us of Sarah Ellis in The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (Lorna Sarge, 1980). "If then for a man it is absolutely necessary that he should sacrifice the poetry of his nature for the realities of material and animal existence," Ellis said, "for women there is no excuse -- for women, whose whole life from the cradle to the grave is one of feeling rather than of action; whose highest duty is so often to suffer and be still; whose deepest enjoyments are all relative; who has nothing, and is nothing, of herself; whose experience, if unparticipated, is a total blank; yet whose world of interest is as wide as the realm of humanity, boundless as the ocean of life, and enduring as eternity!"
Ellis wrote this work in the middle of the 19th century, when women in England remained oppressed by patriarchal attitudes. The gender discourse that started at this time in the Europe would rapidly develop and shape a variety of feminist outlooks. Yet, male domination, which puts women in a position of subordination in the name of sexual ideology, remains in force, even at the early of the 21st century.
Joyfu lly, I recommend this book; Sylvia Plath's Crossing the Water, to anyone who loves to read poetry as a mirror of the life itself. I believe after we read her poems, we will accept as true that compared with all of us, a tree is immortal…. *
Advantages: great collection with loots of depth Disadvantages: none
feminist influences within her work.
1 ‘Winter Trees’ by SylviaPlath.
2 ‘SylviaPlath’ by S. Bassnett. (Pg 114)
3 http://www.slflannery.freeserve.co.uk/godiva/index.html
4 ‘SylviaPlath’ by S. Bassnett. (Pg 96)
5 ‘SylviaPlath’ by S. Bassnett. (Pg 96)
6 From another poem: ‘Ariel’.
7 From another poem: ‘Tulips’.
8 ‘SylviaPlath: Selected Poems’ by York Notes Pg 53
9 ‘Winter Trees’ by SylviaPlath.
10 ‘The Colossus’ by SylviaPlath.
11 ‘Crossing the Water’ by SylviaPlath.
Finally, a comment on winter trees: this selection is excellent but should be read in conjunction with her other poems. There are lots of fabulous collections out there! ...
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