The Colossus

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Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. There are also several examples of alliteration in ‘The Colossus’. These are seen in the use and reuse of the same consonant sounds at the beginning of multiple words. For instance, “Pieced” and “properly” in line two of the first stanza as well as “ladders” and “lysol” in stanza two. These examples help to increase the rhythm and rhyme in a poem, especially when that poem is written in free verse.

Sylvia Plath's first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in England in October 1960 and in the US in 1962. Crossing the Water, the third of Plath's collections, was published posthumously, after Ariel, in 1971. It contains some poems written around the same time as those in The Colossus ('Private Ground' (CW) and 'The Manor Garden' (C) were both written in 1959) and others which predate, or in some cases coincide with, the poems of Ariel; 'In Plaster' (CW), for example, was written on the same day as Ariel's 'Tulips'. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.

The poem's subject is no longer what's being looked at but the looking itself, or, more precisely, the strained psyche behind the eyes that distorts what's being seen. Plath's extraordinary verbal inventiveness has begun to find a subject equal to it: the shape-shifting the mind exerts on the world, the ways the heart can inflect, even infect, what happens. Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996.

Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 2000, Tim Kendall, review of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962,p. 12. Broe, Mary Lynn, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1980. During the nights, the speaker crouches in the statue’s left ear to avoid the wind, amusing herself by counting red and plum-colored stars. The sun rises in the morning under the eave of the statue’s tongue. All of the speaker’s hours are “married to shadow,” and she no longer bothers to listen to the sound of a small boat scraping against the stones of the landing.Linda would often sit or walk with me when I was under the spell and I would talk breathlessly about one point or another, all with what I thought was an emulation of Plath's deep seated passion. One morning walking across campus, me to chemistry and she to a literature class, she stopped me and we stood facing one another. She smiled at the surprised look on my face. She kissed me on the cheek, and turned and walked away. I stood stunned, unable to comprehend. Finally I went on to chemistry class, although unable to concentrate. 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.” 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.” Newman, Charles, editor, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1970. Axelrod, Steven Gould, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1990.

The Colossus, Heinemann (London, England), 1960, published as The Colossus and Other Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1962. She steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poetess. She simply writes good poetry. And she does so with a seriousness that demands only that she be judged equally seriously... There is an admirable no-nonsense air about this; the language is bare but vivid and precise, with a concentration that implies a good deal of disturbance with proportionately little fuss." [5] New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3. Guardian (Manchester, England), August 18, 2001, Christina Patterson, "Ted on Sylvia, for the Record," p. R3.I discovered Sylvia Plath as an undergraduate freshman, introduced to The Bell Jar by my very good friend and drama student, Linda. Linda's perspective of life was that life was art. She would often model nude for drawing studies on campus and attempted, on several occasions, to induce me to do the same. I chatted with her one evening as she disrobed in front of me for the art class and I then watched, in a mix of awe and embarrassment, as the the class of about 20 sketched her in charcoal. Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987. Stevenson, Anne, Bitter Fame: The Undiscovered Life of Sylvia Plath, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1989. Clearly, imagery is crucial in ‘The Colossus’. Plath is known for crafting complex, moving images that are equally beautiful as they are disturbing. This poem is no exception. One of the best examples comes from the last stanza with the lines: “Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. / The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue”.

Under pseudonym Victoria Lucas) The Bell Jar (novel), Heinemann (London, England), 1963, published under real name, Faber (London, England), 1965, Harper (New York, NY), 1971. Bundtzen also interprets the poem through a feminist lens. She sees it as an illumination of "woman's psyche as it is shaped by a patriarchal culture." She cites Plath's many allusions - to the Oresteia and Greek tragedy - to suggest that the speaker is conflicted about having to exist in the shadow of a father figure, while remaining desperate for it to speak to her. She is unable to declare her individuality in this context, and yet cannot muster the strength to make a change. From this perspective, the poem offers a more universal critique, rather than merely exploring the author's personal past. Like Plath, I became married to shadow without being inspired to proceed. She was something dangerous to me and at the same time so appealing, having touched an element deep inside. I asked myself if this was Plath's inevitable path towards tragedy. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts, Harper (New York, NY), 1979. I’m not sure I believe her here. “God” is not a word you encounter often with Plath. Eliot had the comfort of his belief. Plath’s interest is more on the level of one attending – quite willingly – an autopsy.Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1988. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959, Lund University Press, 1994.