83. Mißverstandene Sylvia Plath

Given the historical circumstances of Plath’s death, it was perhaps inevitable that the poetry would end up being shortchanged. What’s stranger is that the fascination with the life has not led to the benign neglect of the work, but has actually resulted in its being actively misread (even by people who have never really read it). A particularly striking example of this was the reaction critics had to Sylvia. A reviewer for Salon blithely asserted that Plath’s work was „carping.“ Writing in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane — generally a sensitive reader of poetry — bemoaned the poems‘ „self-absorption“ and encouraged the film’s viewers not to read Plath afterward; instead, he hoped they would find „better and saner things to do.“ At the time, when I told one colleague, a well-read journalist, that I liked Plath’s work, he responded, „You mean you liked her when you were eighteen?“

This is unfortunate. Plath’s work shouldn’t be cavalierly dismissed, because she is one of the most original American poets of the second half of the century. The fascination with the grisly bits of her biography has caused emphasis to fall on the poetry’s most heated, personal aspects — and indeed it’s easy to imagine how lines like „Every woman adores a Fascist,“ repeated out of context, quickly come to seem more attitudinal than insightful. But Plath was among the most publicly ambitious, disciplined, hard-working poets of the century. / Meghan O´Rourke, Poetry (mitgeteilt von Poetry Daily)

26.3.04