Sylvia Plath: Drawings

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Throughout her life Plath cited art as her deepest source of inspiration; yet while her writing is celebrated around the world, her drawings are little known. This publication brings together drawings from 1955 to 1957, the period she spent on a Fulbright fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge. During this time she met and married in secret the poet Ted Hughes, travelling with him on honeymoon to Paris and Spain before their return to the US in June 1957. Editor) American Poetry Now (supplement number 2 to Critical Quarterly,) Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1961. Critical Survey, September, 2000, James Booth, "Competing Pulses: Secular and Sacred in Hughes, Larkin, and Plath," p. 3.

In addition to Plath’s artwork, the exhibition also includes letters, manuscripts, photos, and personal items like the author's writing desk, which was constructed by Hughes from a rough-cut piece of elm wood; her childhood ponytail, lopped off by Plath’s mother when she was 13 years old; and her typewriter, “as a reminder of the way that writing was a physical process," Moss explains. Together, they provide a nuanced view of an author who's commonly viewed as a dark, brooding intellectual. Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990. Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,“The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath’s death at 30.” Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, “I can’t recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath’s death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book.” Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work “spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed,” to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century. Sylvia Plath’s meteoric posthumous rise as a pre-eminent American poet has eclipsed the fact that she was a talented artist as well. When she initially enrolled at Smith College, her first choice of major was studio art. After discovering her talent for writing, her professors encouraged her to major in English instead. The exhibition features a carefully selected array of images and objects from the Plath archives at Smith College and Indiana University's Lilly Library, two collections that have never been brought together before in a museum exhibition. Dorothy Moss, curator of painting and sculpture at the Portrait Gallery, is curator of this show, joined by guest co-curator Karen Kukil, associate curator of rare books and manuscripts at Smith College.

Plath’s Passion for Modern Painting

Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963, selected and edited with a commentary by mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, Harper (New York, NY), 1975. The Telegraph has a gallery of thirty of these drawings, which were on display at London’s Mayor Gallery between November and December of 2011. Plath’s writing has always been remarkably visual, her deft handling of sometimes startling imagery giving her work so much of its ability to seduce, enthrall, and unsettle. As in her poetry, the images of herself seem to attract the most interest. There are other pieces of Plath self-portraiture, but none contrasts so much with the youthful painting above, I think, as the accomplished pencil drawing below, with the poet’s fearless sidelong stare and bare shoulders expressing both her vulnerability and considerable personal and creative power. I brought, from my walk yesterday, a purple thistle and a dandelion cluster home with me, and drew them both in great and loving detail; I also did a rather bad drawing of a teapot and some chestnuts, but will improve with practice; it gives me such a sense of peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything. I can lose myself completely in the line, lose myself in it. . . .

The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983. Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987. Through personal letters, her own artwork, family photographs and relevant objects, this exhibition highlights Plath’s struggle to understand her own self and to navigate the societal pressures placed on young women during her time. Her Smith College thesis, “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels,” suggests that she took an academic approach to studying her own dualities. Dr Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s English literature and historical manuscripts specialist, said the sale, which opens on 9 July, is without precedent and the items sold by the Plath family show Plath’s creative development, her love for Hughes and her sense of humour.In Plath’s final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia Plath,“death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because there is no longer dialogue, no sense of ‘Otherness’—she is speaking from a viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows as much as the Eye sees.” Alvarez believed that “the very source of [Plath’s] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost.” Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959, Lund University Press, 1994.

Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 2000, Tim Kendall, review of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962,p. 12.There is a dangerous fallacy — a biological falsehood, a feebleness of empathy, an ethical failing — in the view that people who die by suicide after living with mental illness have somehow failed at life. It is one thing to feel deeply the tragedy of that loss, to rue the help not available to them in their time of struggle; it is quite another to fault the faulty instrument itself. It is impossible for any one consciousness to truly know what living inside another is like in the first place — we make art and poems and songs to try to show each other what it is like to be alive in this body-mind. But it is especially unfathomable for a mind coursing with fairly ordinary biochemistry, housed in a brain with fairy ordinary neurophysiology, to grasp what it might be like to live with a mind inflamed by ceaselessly misfiring neurotransmitters or a mind housed in a brain with a large tumor pressing against the amygdala at every moment of every hour. To survive even a single day with such a mind is no small feat. To have not only survived thirty-one years, as Sylvia Plath did, but to have filled those years with works of staggering beauty, with poems that irradiate generations of lives — that is a rare triumph of the spirit. One of Sylvia Plath’s little-known paintings. Hers was an epitome of standard-issue 50s white, middle class American childhood, the kind of supposedly idyllic upbringing which no small number of people still remember today in a glowing, nostalgic haze. In Plath’s excavations of the identities that she cultivated herself and those she had pushed upon her, she gazed with radical intensity at America’s patriarchal social fictions, and the violence and entitlement that lay beneath them. The collage above from 1960 presents us with the kind of layered, cut-up, hybrid text that William Burroughs had begun experimenting with not long before. You can see more highlights from the Plath exhibit, “One Life: Sylvia Plath,” at the National Portrait Gallery. Also featured are Plath’s family photos, books, letters, her typewriter—and, in general, several more dimensions of her life than most of us know. Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again. Newman considered The Bell Jar a “testing ground” for Plath’s poems. It is, according to the critic, “one of the few American novels to treat adolescence from a mature point of view. ... It chronicles a nervous breakdown and consequent professional therapy in non-clinical language. And finally, it gives us one of the few sympathetic portraits of what happens to one who has genuinely feminist aspirations in our society, of a girl who refuses to be an event in anyone’s life. ... [Plath] remains among the few woman writers in recent memory to link the grand theme of womanhood with the destiny of modern civilization.” Plath told Alvarez that she published the book under a pseudonym partly because “she didn’t consider it a serious work ... and partly because she thought too many people would be hurt by it.”

urn:oclc:record:1392023623 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier sylviaplathdrawi0000plat Identifier-ark ark:/13960/s2xvgj16qsx Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780062315700 Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. Plath, Sylvia, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 2000. In a letter to Hughes she penned one Sunday morning in October of 1956, twenty-four-year-old Plath traces her initial toe-dipping in art:In a “Monday P.S.” addition to the same letter, Plath relays to Hughes yet another drawing episode with equal parts irreverence and earnest excitement: Observer, June 1, 1986; February 18, 1996; March 19, 2000, Kate Kellaway, "The Poet Who Died So Well," p. 21.