Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Words Left Unspoken--Updated 6/1/00
© Pamela St. Clair
What does one’s writing reveal about oneself? What figure behind the mask do the words on the page reveal? And how does the fact that one writer’s words sparked another’s complicate the issue?
I recently attended a poetry reading by the poets' daughter Frieda Hughes. Her first collection of poetry, Wooroloo : Poems was published last year and received mixed reviews. She read at Smith College, her mother’s alma mater. As I sat in the audience, knowing full well that I was not about to see a platinum blonde 20 year old Sylvia Plath walk up to the podium, I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of disappointment when her daughter, with brown hair and her father’s strong jawline, strode to the stage and awkwardly began to read. As her confidence grew, I wondered if here on the campus where her mother feverishly wrote and published short stories and poems, Frieda would read “Granny,” a tirade against her maternal grandmother, Plath’s mother, or “Readers,” the one poem that evokes her anger toward those of us who “finger through her [mother’s] mental underwear” as we seek to understand Plath as a person and as a writer. But she didn’t. She kept to “safer” poems, those that conjure the landscape of Australia, where Frieda lived for many years, and those that let us peak into her own private world, not her mother’s or her father’s. How difficult it must be, as a daughter of two famous poets, to find your own voice. What words do you leave in and what words do you leave out?
** An engaging two part article (May 30th and June 1st) by Kate Moses in Salon.com ( http://www.salon.com/books ) discusses new research regarding the biological causes of Sylvia's mood swings.
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