What makes Plath Plath? The Colossus? All buttoned
Down and enjambed? Ariel’s biting through? The corset
Burst? Rising at once to bird height and anticipating
The crash? Syllables one on another’s heels? Becoming?
Eternity bores me, you write in ‘Years,’ I never wanted it.
What did you want? The piston in motion – my soul dies
Before it, and the hooves of the horses, their merciless churn.
The rude imagery in a rush, a burst from stasis, the mind
On a leash, blood berries dying to fly. ‘These last poems
Stun me,’ Anne Sexton says. ‘They eat time.’
‘The Ariel poems trace the short trajectory from being close
To wanting nothing, to wanting nothing,’ Janet Malcolm claims.
‘The journals and letters trace Plath’s struggle against clinical
And existential depression.’ Her ‘relentlessly humourless vision
Of herself as the heroine of a great drama gives her journal a verve
And a lustre that the journals of more restrained … writers
Lack …’ In other words, Malcolm notes, they are the various
Manic defences offered by a romantic imagination.
We are either victims of our imagination or our lack
Of imagination: either way, with or without
Adequate containment, we appear to be victims.