We have been studying poetry in my Creative Writing class. Several students brought Sylvia Plath’s work into the class to analyze. These students were raving about Plath’s genius, so I read her poetry with great curiosity.
I didn’t like it.
I found it to be simultaneously dull and melodramatic; the diction is simple and the repetition is tedious. The poems we read were boring and whiny, as blasphemous as that might be to speak of Sylvia Plath in such a way. But that’s what I felt as I read her poetry.
One of the biggest issues I have with Sylvia Plath’s poetry is that many people seem to like it just because it’s Sylvia Plath. Before our poetry classes, I had never read any poems written by Plath; I had only read her novel The Bell Jar. I liked the book and thought that she touched on important issues and wrote in a compelling style. But the two poems that we read in class, Daddy and Lady Lazarus, which are spoken of as two of her best pieces of poetry, just fell flat for me.
The rest of her poetry might be amazing (after all, these were only two of her poems that we read), and it could just be that my preference doesn’t match her style. I don’t claim to know any more about poetry than the next person. But as we read her poetry, I knew that if I hadn’t seen her name attached to the poems, I wouldn’t have thought much of them anyways. Reading them, I thought that they could have been written by anyone in my Introduction to Creative Writing class. The poetry seemed… amateur. Childish.
We often glorify and romanticize the notion of “the depressed genius”. We aren’t approaching the poetry objectively because we have preconceived notions and expectations about the author. Another poem we looked at in my class, for example, was a sonnet by William Shakespeare. I have a soft spot for Shakespeare, and the student who brought the poem announced that it was Shakespeare before she read the poem aloud. I was already biased before I even saw the poem. It turned out that I really liked it, and I believe I would have liked the poem even if I hadn’t known that it was by Shakespeare, but I do not think that I would have liked it as much had it been written by some other unknown author.
I have a challenge for you: the next time you read a piece of literature or a piece of poetry, don’t look at the author’s name before you read it. Form your opinion based on knowing nothing about the author. It could be interesting to see how many supposedly fantastic authors truly resonate with you, and how many do not.
I don’t like Sylvia Plath’s writing, either. Which is probably why it makes a good comparison for my own.
It was funny when I realized that one of the issues I had with Plath’s writing is that it seems too melodramatic, and I didn’t like how we’re “supposed” to like it just because it’s autobiographical… and that most of MY creative writing is equally an over-dramatized, autobiographical style. Heh.
I agree 100%. Even worse is when your professor analyzes the poem/story. When I was in school we were reading a story and the teacher said that the reason it was raining was to mirror this and that and it went along with the character’s feelings etc. I remember thinking, maybe the author just wanted it to be raining in that scene.
Maybe I’m not that kind of thinker, could be just me……….
I think you’re right about this. We CAN read a great deal into things like poetry, but at the same time… maybe it’s enjoyable to read simply because it’s pretty. Not everything HAS to be symbolism. Sometimes it’s nice to just appreciate the aesthetics of the literal meaning!