Poetry Friday

Poetry Friday June 24, 2022: My Deep Dive into Plath Poetry

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Reading to the Core. Hop on over there for the roundup. 
 

Deep Dive into Plath Poetry

I mentioned the fact that I was reading Sylvia Plath’s poems when I wrote about the “Spring Break of Sylvia Plath,” but I wanted to add more about this collection specifically. 
 
Before this deep dive into Sylvia’s life, I really had not read much of her poetry. I took my daughter to a small Sylvia Plath exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery a few years ago. 
 
One thing I liked about this collection is that is arranged by when she wrote the poems. As I read Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, the biography of Plath’s life, it was interesting to see what was happening in her life as she wrote these poems. Poems from her early years are relegated to the back as “Juvenilia,” which bothered me a bit. I assume because they weren’t as good as her other poems? At least according to Ted Hughes. 
 
I’ll be totally honest, I didn’t understand some of the poems. Some were very accessible and some were not (at least for me). I took notes on each poem as part of my three-a-day ritual, and I also jotted down notes about words I didn’t know. I expect that poetry written a hundred or more years ago would have language I wouldn’t necessarily understand, but I was surprised poems written in the 1950s and 1960s would have so much.
 
 
However, one thing I noticed that I repeatedly wrote down is that she is a master of sound: assonance, consonance, alliteration. She does that well and that is most of what I wrote down. Occasionally, I wrote down how she used a word in an interesting and unexpected way.
 
Overall, I enjoyed doing a deep dive into poetry and life of a poet. If you know of any other poet biography and collected poems pairings, let me know. 
 
 

Haiku of the Week

spent blooms
brittle rattle in the breeze
flower skeletons
 
Photo and Haiku © 2022 Marcie Flinchum Atkins 
 

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