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"Full Moon and Little Frieda", "Morning Song", "The Goring", "The Poetry of Plath and Hughes: call and response", "You Hated Spain", Diane Middlebrook, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes
In my last post, I admitted that I’ve been trying to look at Plath and Hughes as two separate poets. I also lamented about the futile nature of trying to separate the two. In Diane Middlebrook’s essay, “The poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: call and response,” I realize why this extra and careful effort has been futile. In the essay, Middlebrook describes the blossom of Plath’s relationship with Hughes as violent, agressive, and poetic. It is my understanding, from the essay, that Hughes had criticized Plath’s work and she intended to approach him at a party. Perhaps, her confrontation didn’t go as planned:
I bit him long and hard on the cheek… blood was running down his face. His poem ‘I did it, I”. Such violence and I can see how women lie down for artists”, Sylvia Plath
I think it is interesting that Middlebrook divides the authors’ works into three categories: Courtship poems, marriage poems, and separation poems. I think that this is interesting seeing as how both Plath and Hughes were writers and poets before they met, seeing as it is how they met. It ties in with the fact that all of Plath’s poetry before her courtship with Ted Hughes was listed as “Juvenilia” in Plath’s collected poems, which was compiled and edited by Hughes after Plath’s death. The courtship poems seem to be poems, as I expressed before, of a tumultuous, aggressive passion. I think that Plath desperately wanted to be recognized as a poet by Hughes and his peers. Not to say that Plath wasn’t attracted to Hughes, because based on her poems and journal enteries, the attract was evident.
The call and response of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s work wasn’t always immediate. For example, Ted Hughes’ collection Birthday Letters serves as a response to their life together, as well as some of Plath’s poems. Middlebrook sites poems such as Plath’s “Morning Song” and Hughes’ “Full Moon and Little Freida.” Most of the examples of Plath’s call and responses to eachother’s poetry, I’ve found in poems that Hughes responded to after Plath’s death, such as Hughes’ “You Hated Spain,” which is published in his collection Birthday Letters. It seems that “You Hated Spain” is a response to Plath’s “The Goring.”
Excerpt from Sylvia Plath’s “The Goring” (1956):
Rode out against the fifth bull to brace his pike and slowly bear
Deep down into the bent bull-neck. Cumbrous routine, not artwork,
Instinct for art began with the bull’s horn lofting in the mob’s
Hush a lumped man-shape. The whole act formal, fluent as a dance.
Blood faultlessly broached redeemed the sullied air, the earth’s grossness.
Excerpt from Ted Hughes’ “You Hated Spain” (1998)
So we sat as tourists at the bullfight Watching bewildered bull awkwardly butchered, Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier Just below us, straightening his bent sword And vomiting with fear. And the horn That hid itself inside the blowfly belly Of the toppled picador punctured What was waiting for you…
It goes without saying, that two people living in close quarters are bound to have similar life experiences, but it is also true that both parties will interpret this events and experiences quit differently from the other. Their short courtship, the birth of their children, Plath’s miscarriage, Ted’s affair, and their eventual separation were simultaneous occurrences that they were bound to experience differently.
Middlebrook mentions that Plath and Hughes sometimes drafted their poems on the reverse side of the others’ finished poem. Imagine, that you pick up a piece of paper, you are bound to scan, perhaps you actually read what is written. My significant other is a musician and a writer, and more often than not, I grab a piece of paper to write down a reminder or an important thought and I end up becoming influenced by what I had just read. I’ve published a poem that was inspired by my significant others’ lyrics. I’ve discussed what I read in the essay with my significant other, I asked him how he would feel if we had this type of collaboration: a call and response. He thought that it would be a stifling arrangement. We’re both constructive critics of each others’ work, but we try to separate our work for the sake of our relationship.
I try to imagine what a life would be like, in such close quarters, being influenced by the same experiences and also being influenced by each others’ work. Middlebrook also noted that Plath took many breaks in her writing, quiet periods, where I imagine that the demands of motherhood and household overshadowed her ability to focus on her craft, which Hughes never experienced, at least not in the same way that Plath experienced it. I think that it would be difficult to have a relationship based on a passion, then criticism, and continuous echos from one poet to the other that manifested in their work.