In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle ponders the significance of the humble toothbrush in modern poetry
‘As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can’t put toothbrushes in a poem, I really can’t!’ Sylvia Plath’s statement – made in a 1962 interview with Peter Orr – has become well-known for its articulation of the supposed limits of the poem’s ‘paraphernalia’: what can and can’t be worked into a poem.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Octobers and birthdays loom large in Sylvia Plath’s work, which perhaps isn’t surprising since she was born in October (27 October 1932 – which, it just so happens, was the day Dylan Thomas turned 18 years old). As well as writing ‘Poppies in October’ and ‘Poem for a Birthday’, Sylvia Plath also wrote ‘Ariel’, which came out of both her birthday and the last October she was alive on earth: she wrote ‘Ariel’ on 27 October 1962, her 30th birthday.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Mirror’: not the most famous of Sylvia Plath’s poem titles, perhaps, but a fine example of her ability to inhabit some other person, character, or – as here – object, and imbue it with a clear, commanding voice which reveals things about us, and what it is to be human. And, specifically here, what it is to be a woman. You can read ‘Mirror’ here before continuing to our analysis.
By Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Dying is an art, like everything else’: ‘Lady Lazarus’, as the poem’s title implies, is a poem about resurrection – but implicit within its title, and Sylvia Plath’s reference to the man whom Jesus brought back from the dead, is the idea of annihilation or extinction, a theme that is never far away from us with a Plath poem. You can read ‘Lady Lazarus’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Written in October 1961 as she was beginning to find her own distinctive poetic voice, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ is one of the most widely discussed and analysed of Sylvia Plath’s poems. This is perhaps inevitable, in a poem which is so loaded with symbols; our instinct as readers, and as literary critics, is to decode the symbol or discover what the poem really ‘means’.
You can read ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.