Sylvia Plath 1438148445, 2013, (Journals, 409): In early July, they brought out their ouija board and spoke with their spirit, Pan, whose god is "Kolossus"; Pan told her to write about the Lorelei. 6 As a result, Plath wrote a poem, "Lorelei," which explored her Germanic roots. 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.” The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit (for children), illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1996. 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.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987. The statue, which is based on a real creation from Rhodes in 280 BC, is in ruins. The speaker is a caretaker of sorts. She tends to the statue, sometimes expressing irritation or exasperation with it and other times relishing in its presence. As the poem progresses it becomes clear that the poet is using this caretaker/deceased statue relationship to depict her own relationship to her deceased father. Despite the fact that the boat’s keel is never going to scrape on the shore, she still curls up in the statue’s ear and takes in his presence.

Summary

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. I thought a great deal about that moment and I cannot tell you how long I spent until I came to understand, but it was probably years later, long enough so that I recognized that Plath and my despondency went together all too well. My hours are married to shadow. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 17, 1981; Volume 50, 1988; Volume 51, 1989. Seamus Heaney. "The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath." in The Government of the Tongue. NY: Faber, 1988, p. 154.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, First Series, 1980; Volume 6, American Novelists since World War II, Second Series, 1980; American Novelists since World War II, Fourth Series, 1995. 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] The speaker appears to gain something from the time she spends there. She sits there, out of the wind. This is a very disturbing poem, and one that draws on Queen Gertrude’s “long purples” speech regarding Ophelia’s fate (Act IV, sc. 7). After the rot and watery decay, Plath tries to pull an Eliot, meditating on the skull beneath the skin:There is an interesting allusion at the start of the fourth stanza. Here, she refers to “Oresteia” Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, one more classical reference that keeps the poem in the right atmosphere. It is also used to describe the sky above the scene in all its grandeur. It’s in the second line that the metaphor really starts coming through clearly. She refers to the statue as “father”.

Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. It's had, it's had an, it's made me. . . I'm sorry, I have to sit down and start again. In the first few stanzas, Plath seems exasperated with her father’s monumentality, expressing her fear that she “shall never get [him] put together entirely.” Further, she is dismissive of what she perceives as smugness in his desire to be an oracle, when all he can produce is unpleasant animal noise. Considering the emotions at display here, it is unclear why she would bother to scale the statue. The Colossus, Heinemann (London, England), 1960, published as The Colossus and Other Poems, Knopf (New York, NY), 1962. New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3. Plath, Sylvia, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.

Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1971, Random House (New York, NY), 1972. 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”. 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.