About three female poets

Sylvia Plath, an American confessional poet

Criticism on the rainy camphor tree

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Death is an art/everything is like this/I want to make it especially wonderful.

Plath: Mrs lazare.

I think I'm rising/I think I'll rise/the boiling water drops have evaporated/and my love.

Plath: high fever 103 degrees

It stands to reason that when I focus on Sylvia Pruen and his poems, I should first talk about imparting my new personality and new content to Plath's poet robert lowell. Lowell's poems written by his unique experience from the inside out made his style completely different from that of the United States in the 1950s. His collection of poems, Life Research (published in 1959), revealed the poet's inner world activities in an amazing and frank way, which was a turning point in the poetic style of many young poets at that time, especially Plath. As soon as this book was published, it stirred up the whole American poetry circle and produced a large number of poets of different factions. American poetry has since diversified. As American critics say, American poetry has encountered Malthusian nightmare. Confessions stood out and swept the United States. In addition to him, there are poems by Plath's good friend Anne sexton that shocked the United States but committed suicide in 1974 to meet death; 1972 John Bhajman, who committed suicide in despair, is almost as famous as Lowell. They are all the most accomplished confessional poets, and they all committed suicide at the most creative and famous time in the country. However, my upbringing is too little, my prejudice is out of control, and I can't bear to mention so much (this selfishness can only be borne by me). Here, I just want to talk about Plath, the youngest poet who died.

When the art world is no longer just politics and propaganda, dogma and beauty, when history opens the heavy door, we will be at a loss in the noise. Too long darkness inside and strong sunshine outside make us temporarily blind. Caution may be the characteristic of our people. Apart from our own too much surprise and confusion, the poet's insanity, suicide, violence, morbid consciousness and sexual despair are no longer pushed into the forbidden zone in the high-voltage power grid. The poet's sadness, cowardice, shyness and so on are no longer vilified, ridiculed and slandered. Art needs a realistic insight into itself.

When we talk about literature involving post-modernist literature, no matter how we gasp, praise and criticize, we can't help but think of the confessional school, which distastes many American modernist poets today and still sweeps the American literary world. Then, a thin and beautiful face will emerge-she is the poet Sylvia Plath.

Although Plath's poetry creation and life ended before the development of American feminist movement, her works became the touchstone of later feminist movement. She provided many favorable references for the later feminist movement. When it comes to "women's literature" in America, the first thing that comes to mind is her. Her poems show another world of human inner world. She basically expresses pessimism, despair and confusion with familiar materials-things from daily life. Whether it is barbarism, sexual nudity or suicidal intention, everything is so close and lovely to her that she is no longer afraid. In traditional literature, those behaviors and obscene things that are considered extremely irregular are so aboveboard in her poems: "Cold, the light of death! Spilled fragrance from a sweet, deep throat. " All these prove that the suicide she pursues is so inevitable and reasonable that she can get a unique "fragrance" of suicide, ending the poet's deep loneliness and pain, and proving that her real experience gives her poetry great significance beyond the simple literary voice.

Plath is the youngest, most artistic and the earliest female poet who committed suicide in Confessions. She is the daughter of German immigrants, 1932 was born in Boston, and her father is a famous biologist and a university professor. At the age of eight, he began to vomit poetry, write novels and paint oil paintings, and began to publish his works when he was a girl. At the age of nine, her father died unfortunately, and her depression and pain multiplied, which made her feel abandoned and unbearable, followed by an irrepressible sense of guilt and loneliness, and she entered the territory of adult pain and loneliness prematurely. All this gave her an unavoidable illusion that she seemed to be responsible for her father's death to some extent. The little girl's premature maturity brought her undue troubles and thoughts. This unfortunate maturity has created her unique poetic temperament. While studying at Smith Girls' School, she won the academic and literary excellence award, and won the summer editorial position of Miss magazine in the school committee. After graduation, I won a prize to go to Cambridge University in England for further study. 1956, The Giant, a poem collection of the Virgin Mary, was published, also known as the Giant Statue. She was only 24 years old at that time, but the giant was widely praised for his superb poetic skills. It was not until she had a chance to review her poems that this collection of poems vaguely hinted at the shocking imbalance in her later works. In the gentle lines, we can feel her unique melancholy at that time, and then know that her spiritual life is extremely unstable. When I was in middle school and college, I took too many drugs and tried to commit suicide many times. In Mrs. lazare, she told us like a fairy tale to a child: "I am a smiling woman/only thirty years old/but I want to die like a cat nine times." When robert lowell was teaching poetry at Boston University, she listened to it occasionally, but she was not a formal student. "I felt her shyness and personality, but I never thought of her shocking and successful results," Lowell recalled when writing the preface to Ariel, the second book of poetry edited and published after her husband ted hughes died.

While studying in Britain, Plath met the young poet ted hughes (1984 is the most famous poet laureate in Britain), married him and gave birth to two children. It stands to reason that the young mother has just started a sweet life, but Plath can't easily trust the muse, mother and poet at the same time. These three roles, women's unique dissatisfaction, are more sensitive to her. In her shrill personal voice, it is difficult to realize the collective strength of female poets before her. She never wants to speak for women like other female poets. Her poems are quite different from those of other female poets. The images in her poems are not only images of family life (such as mirrors, cooking, raising children, scarves, work done for family members, etc.). ), but also the images of limited space (home, nursing home, room, garden), especially the images of human beings (scars, blood, hair, bones, uterus, corpses, etc.). ), which frankly pointed out many pathological conditions in life. Because of social customs and sincere love for children, she can not get the necessary space for writing and thinking. This kind of pain created the theme of Plath's poems. Her "masculine" or "combative" energy is more prominent than that of ordinary female poets, although she is desperate (as can be felt from Trees in Winter, Three Women and Wading). Plath's husband began to love her very much, but perhaps it was the pessimism and strong female consciousness of the poetess who always thought that she was abused by her husband like a lamb (Hughes had another love in the 1960s, which made Plath very miserable). 1In the winter of 962, she broke up with Hughes. She immigrated from America to Britain again, but her life became more tense. A rare sense of loneliness haunts her inexplicably, like breathing a strong anesthetic in the air, and pain makes her poetry full of vitality. However, here, poems welled up in her mind. These poems have a strong sense of rhythm, indifferent images and powerful images, which are separated from readers by a certain distance. It is inevitable to use interlaced lines to express the theme of anxiety and relief, and the gentle tone in her early poems will never be seen again. The whole poem consists of passionate images. These seemingly snowflake-like poems, like hail, hit the traditional and seemingly green human beings who are all weeds. She melted everything into the pyramid of poetry and flew higher and higher in the territory of confession.

In the last days of Plath's life, every accident, a little injustice, even a little scratch, flies on the wall, in the poet's melancholy and affectionate eyes, are all confessions of destruction. For example, her poem:

injury from a blunt utensil

Color came to this place, dim purple,

The rest of the body was washed clean,

The color of pearls.

In the abyss of rocks,

The ocean sucks with fascination,

A hole, the center of the whole ocean,

The volume of a fly,

A sign of destruction,

Slowly climb down the wall,

The heart is closed,

The waves receded,

The mirror was wrapped in a shroud.

"Dimness, abyss, emptiness, flies, destruction, closure, shroud" and so on, she especially missed the image of gray, and became more and more extreme in her creation, preparing a lot of dowry for her suicide. In the mirror of poetry, nothing more will be reflected. Plath's inner expression of his injury always makes people feel particularly wronged. With powerful metaphors, the simplest syntax and her concern for the rhythm and harmony of poetry, she used optical instruments to understand the muscle tissue of her heart and tried to suppress her anger destructively. She inspired other poets to expand their lyric fields.

Among confessional poets, although there are only four or five most successful poets, Plath's poems are the most representative. She repeatedly wrote about her pursuit of death and was obsessed with finding chaos in the relationship between self and objectivity, which almost pushed the tragic self-disclosure in the confessional school to the extreme. In her eyes, self and the world are combined by pain. She can best represent the confessional tendency in contemporary American poetry. In expressing this unique and successful internal destructive factor with a little adventure (Ms. lazare), she is a suicide expert. Death is an art/everything is like this. 1963 In the early morning of February, she threw herself into the arms of the gas cooker and never wanted to wake up again. Regarding her behavior, her friend insisted that Plath had planned the next step, expecting to be discovered by her handyman after nine o'clock, but unfortunately, the cleaning lady was late for some reason that day. When she arrived, Plath was already dead.

Plath's most outstanding poems were written in the last two or three years of her life, or the last five months. After her death, although she was able to publish some poems gradually, Hughes (her ex-husband), who was smart and talented, was particularly selfish and allergic to Plath's poems. Some of Plath's poems were suppressed for more than 20 years until 1982. He also destroyed her last diary, making the whole literary world feel sorry for it. This is also the genius of the poet Hughes. But I don't want to belittle Hughes at all.

Since the publication of Ariel, two books of poetry have been published: Wading in the Water and Trees in Winter. Although this has expanded arielle's achievements, the scope of change is not considerable. As Lowell wrote, in Ariel, everything is personal, penitent and tangible, but the way of feeling is the illusion of control, a fanatical autobiography ... suicide, hating father, self-blame-there seems to be nothing too much for the horrible happiness. However, this is too much: her artistic immortality is the division of life. "In" High Fever 103 Degrees ",she thinks that" with indelible smell/love, faint smoke is rolling in, and from here/like isadora's scarf, I am involved in terror. "The author has never given up his insight into the morbid society. In her mind, love is so hypocritical and hateful. Among job seekers, she describes herself as a candidate, an automatic machine consisting of "glass eyes, dentures, crutches, braces, hooks" and "rubber breasts and rubber crotch", where love itself is frustrating. We have to believe that her separation from Hughes is her first step towards true love, although she has never found true love. In one poem, the moon "drags the ocean like a dark demon", and in another poem, the moon "cruelly drags me/impoverished me/hurts me with her brilliant light." As for the sun, "I suffered the atrocities of the sunset/my roots were burnt." "Selfless Sun is also deceiving and scaring her." The mud of the sun tempts me to be excited. "The sun dries the blood on the wall." The sun becomes selfish and whitewashes the sick society. Although she also embedded maternal love in the poem "Morning Song", "Love drives you to move like a slow gold watch." "Sing for your arrival", but those poems engraved in the hearts of all readers seem to bring people to a crematorium in this beautiful city. She combines hysteria with creative behavior, and expresses the painful pursuit of a sexual abuser with nightmare description and Gothic techniques. The high fever 103 degrees shows that a naked wild woman is engraved in the reader's mind: "my own decomposition/the petticoat of an old prostitute-/the road to Eden." And her "parting". She trembled for the kitchen knife that cut "my thumb instead of onions" and thought she was going to the guillotine. She woke up suddenly and exclaimed, "Bitch girl/cut her thumb", and her bloody fingers reached out to us like in a three-dimensional movie. She is an expert on suicide, death and trading: "I'm not excited/frost turns into flowers,/dew condenses into stars;" /Death clock,/Death clock. //Someone rang the bell. In "The Burning Witch": "I want to dissect this era,/I want to marry the ashes in the stone shadow,/my chastity dances, and the light rises to my thighs. /I am destroyed/I am destroyed in all these masks of light. " Beside, she was very excited: "the light of death/the fragrance overflowing from the sweet and deep mouth." "She will get up from her ashes and become a cannibal." Eating people like air "has no nausea. Besides, there are many poems. If we think that this kind of poetry only describes pain and disappointment, it is not enough, and we should add the last sentence: only when some profound pain and disappointment can be judged as approaching the end of life can this kind of poetry be experienced and written. Its inherent attraction lies in this novelty.

As we know, in a series of poems-Bees Meet, Beehive Arrives, Bee Sting, Bee Colony and Winter-the author's daughter who wrote a paper about wild bees became the queen bee and became the victim of a creepy purple dream about alienation and death. These extraordinary poems are amazing in their achievements as well as in their art. Her poems were quite formal at first, but then they gradually strengthened their strength and concentration. Many of her poems show us that she has foreseen her own death. However, the strength of these poems is not that we have learned about the great events that are about to be realized, but that she has turned simple materials in daily life into chilling symbols and covered up despair with self-denying laughter.

For Plath, life is superfluous, and the superfluous part can neither avoid the crazy experience nor be separated from it. Madness is hysterical madness, and it is more appropriate to regard it as a metaphor for the author's absurd and morbid life. We can always feel this metaphor from her poems. No contemporary poet (at least before her) can so thoroughly expose her strong fascination with sexual abuse-sexual masochism and ruining her happiness. In the confession of American postmodernism, she publicly exposed her personal privacy, inner trauma, disordered emotions, suicidal desire and sexual impulse, and witnessed the rise of her blood pressure and hyperventilating breathing in scattered passwords, thus achieving the purpose of confession-"the symbol of heart and language is one."

Although the confessional school, like the anti-academic school, the Montenegro school, the beat school, the figurative school and the deviant outside the school, has been criticized by many people, it is precisely because of the inherent temptation of the confessional school that the later calm poets and critics are awakened, and people no longer comment on such poems with enthusiasm, because the essence of these poems definitely expresses the authenticity of the poet's emotional life, which is extremely rare and valuable and finally accepted by contemporary people.

In recent years, with her ex-husband ted hughes making her poems more and more public, her international reputation has also improved. Ariel, a collection of poems reprinted seven times, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in the United States in 1982, and Plath finally became a poet concerned by the literary world. Although I defended Plath and his poems in this article, I am not a competent lawyer. However, I should tell readers that I am neither a friend of Plath nor a friend of Plath. When she died, my mother was actually a very shy girl. Now, for me, she is already a poet in history. Only when I was lucky enough to come into contact with her poems, her poems aroused my excitement and excitement, which made me unable to refuse to comment on her poems and could only avoid others for the time being.

After writing my composition, I seem to be more worried. Allow me to add that my article may belittle Sylvia Plath's works, so I just hope that more people will see her poems instead of my comments.

1987 65438+February 10-25, Jinhua, Zhejiang.

Printed in July 2000

Note: Pulitzer Prize for Literature: She was established in 19 17 by Pulitzer's will, and is awarded once a year.