week 4/ Sylvia Plath

There seems to be several similar concepts between this week and Sylvia Plath and last week with Jack Kerouac and the beat poets. The first thing that I noticed was that the power and raw emotion of the literary works are paralleled. Both Plath and the beat poets use their poetry as a type of catharsis, for themselves and for their audiences. By using such strong language Plath and the beat poets claim their reader's instant attention and suck them in to a whole new world. This world, though it may seem wicked and lost at the start, is actually an account of the deepest feelings of mankind. The writing styles are vastly different--Plath slaved over her writting and lived for the acceptance of the literary world while the beat poets rejected such dependance on social rules--and yet the message is still the same raw, human emotion that we all carry.

The second thing that I noticed was that both beat poets and the world of Sylvia Plath use their personal lives as inspiration for their work. It seems as though the harder their lives got, the better their poetry turned out. Why is that, I wonder? The beat poets were living in a post cold war era, where the terror of the past era needed to be dealt with and life had to be reevaluated. These poets found that they needed to live life to the fullest and explore all avenues that were available to them.

Sylvia Plath, on the other hand, grew up in a fairly stable school environment, was consistent in her "by the rules" poetry, married and had children. All of which were seen as normal and acceptable things for women to do at the time. The question then should be, what makes her seemingly mundane history allow for the ingenious poetry that rivaled and complemented that of the beat style? The beat pots lived life day-to-day for the thrill of living alone. Shouldn't this, theoretically, produce the most cathartic poetry?

Was it because she suffered from depression? Or was it her mundane life and almost maniacal need to publish her works that created the depression? Either way we tend to fall back on mental instability to explain away her genius. Or should we take a more romantic view on the purpose of artists and say that it is the poet who is more susceptible to human emotions than the rest of us.

I would like to think so. In my opinion it's the artist's, and especially the poets who are capable of touching the deepest of human emotions and living through the experience to explain them all to us. Yes, we all feel these truths, but perhaps it takes a more specialized being to write them down for us to see plainly. It's the poets who allow us to recognize these topics in a controlled manner.

Without art, I believe that humankind would have no release. We would build in and upon one another with out actually reaching out to touch our neighbors. Perhaps Sylvia Plath, and indeed many other authors and poets, have had trouble achieving this most simple means of human happiness, but they have allowed us to find it. Through them we become more.