SYLVIA PLATH AND CONFESSIONAL POETRY

A reaction to the dictates of Pound and Eliot and the "eXcesses'! of DYllan Thomas. This reaction against the established, intellectual, academic poet- took another form in the u.s. A, and from there travelled to England with Sylvia Plath, The poets involved in this reactionary movement came to be called the Confessional Poets. Heading the group were Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethkc. Younger poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, who Studied with Lowell. leanled to write in the same: anti-intellectual, subjective style. SO did John Berryina. Together. These poets initiated a new trend in poetry, glorifying the personal and the private. expressing their innermost secrets aloud for all to hear. Plath Married Ted Hughes, Confessional poetry already reached England.

'Tile )'ear 1959 illay be regarded as a watershed in the history of literature for it was this year that two imp events took place &  shaped the nature of poetry.

The first of these events was the publication of life Studies by Robert Lowell heralded a new kind of poetry, marking a significant departure from the complex symbolism and the formal language and style of T. S, Eliot. Focusing attention on his own self, Lowell chose to look inward rather than outward. Consequently his work moved away from the classical state, to personal, more private.

Second Imp event in 1959 with poet Allen Ginsberg, his poem became a controversial affair, Changing the concept of poetry.

Lowell and Roetlke, and other poets like Sylvia Plath, John Berymal and Anne Sexton, has come to be called "Confessional Poetry."

Themes-

1. Personal growth childhood

2. Failed relationship

3. Father complex

4. Nervous Breakdown

5. Suicide, death, diseases

6. Desire to shock

7. Question of Authenticity

8. Beyond personal

9. Psychoanalysis

Plath-1933-63

1. Death of father when she was 8

2. Separation from husband

3. First suicide attempt at 21 final at 30

Works- Colossus in 1956, Crossing the water and winter trees,  Arial posthumously published, The Bell Jar, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

The colossus, 
Daddy, 
Lady Lazarus, 
Purdah, Ariel, 
Pursuit, 
The Applicant, 
Fever 103

The colossus

There is an interesting allusion at the start of the fourth stanza. Here, she refers to “Oresteia” Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89119/the-colossus

https://poemanalysis.com/sylvia-plath/the-colossus/

Daddy, 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2

https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/sylvia-plath/daddy

Lady Lazarus

Lazarus is a character from the New Testament who dies, and who Jesus brings back to life in the Gospel of John.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus

https://poemanalysis.com/sylvia-plath/lady-lazarus/

Purdah, 

Antagonised - cause (someone) to become hostile.

Indefatigable - of a person or their efforts) persisting tirelessly.

Pallors - Pale appearance

Polyps - Creature

Appurtenances - an accessory or other item associated with a particular activity or style of living.

Concatenation - a series of interconnected things.

Sheath - a close-fitting cover for the blade of a knife or sword.

Parrakeets - Small parrot like creature

Macaws - Long tailed parrots

Ariel

Stasis - a period or state of inactivity or equilibrium.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49001/ariel

If you found my blog useful please do leave a comment, share with your friends and also check out my Youtube Channel for more informative content - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jxfCZS_h4AVcj2Ioe7S6Q

Philip Larkins and His Major Poems

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin spent his early years in Coventry. Warwickshire. where he was born on 9 August 1922 and later went to Oxford for higher education. At Oxford. In the 1950s he made friends with Kingsley Amis, a fellow student, and came into contact with other writers like John Wain. D. J, Robert Conquest. Donald Davie. and others. Together they brought out the poems in two anthologies. D. J. Enright, and New: Lines, ed. Robert Conquest. This was the beginning of a reactionary movement against the Eliot-Auden school. It heralded the beginning of the "Movement," the new wave in the English poetic tradition.

I REMEMBER I REMEMBER

"I Remember, I Remember" Larkin's reminiscence of childhood, which is generally believed to be a golden period. has no halo of divinity about it. He does not embark on lengthy accounts of his "Fair seedtime," the way Wordsworth does; nor does he grow nostalgic about "lamb-white days" in the manner of Dylan Thomas.

Toads-

Pitchfork=a farm tool with a long handle and two sharp metal prongs, used for lifting hay.

Lout=an uncouth and aggressive man or boy.

pauper=Extremely poor person

Nippers=kids

Whippet=a super-skinny dog breed similar to a greyhound. 

Line 24=this line echoes one of Prospero's lines (IV.i.156-157) from The Tempest.Just like the line from The Tempest, line 24 signals the speaker's acceptance of reality. 

Hunkers= Its hips, butt, and upper thighs ("hunkers") are "heavy as hard luck, / And cold as snow."

Blarney=talk which aims to charm, flatter, or persuade (often considered typical of Irish people).

https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/poetry/toads-philip-larkin/summary/stanza-9

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems/14525

Toads Revisited

Palsied=Shivering

Hare-eyed=The condition in which the eyelids are unable to close

Jittery=nervous or unable to relax.

Lobelias=a chiefly tropical or subtropical plant of the bellflower family, in particular an annual widely grown as a bedding plant. Some kinds are aquatic, and some grow as thick-trunked shrubs or trees on African mountains.

http://greatpoetryexplained.blogspot.com/2016/02/toads-revisited-by-philip-larkin.html

Mr Bleany

Frayed=of a fabric, rope, or cord) unravelled or worn at the edge.

Sill=a shelf or slab of stone, wood, or metal at the foot of a window opening or doorway.

Tussocky = with small areas where the grass is longer and thicker than the grass around them.

Tousling =make (a person's hair) untidy.

Fusty=smelling stale, damp, or stuffy.

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/mr-bleaney/

Church Going

 written in 1954, and published in 1955

 iambic tetrameter

 ababcadcd

religious imagery and words.

In the Collection - Church going with Toads revisited.

Title = the process of going to church and the churches disappearing from our lives.

Agnostic=a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God.

https://www.literaturewise.in/mdl/mod/page/view.php?id=116

The Whitsun Weddings

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48411/the-whitsun-weddings

At Grass

https://allpoetry.com/At-Grass

If you found my blog useful please do leave a comment, share with your friends and also check out my Youtube Channel for more informative content - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jxfCZS_h4AVcj2Ioe7S6Q

DYLAN THOMAS

Block-10 Dylan Thomas

UNIT 48 DYLAN THOMAS

https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22230/1/Unit-48.pdf

Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914 -53) was born on 27th October. 1914 at Swansea South Wales where his father, D. J. Thomas was a teacher of English. Fern Hill and Poem in October. two of his famous poems- suggest that his childhood was happy.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flowers published in 1934, brought him instant fame.

In London life felt strange and he lived a Bohemian life. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara. They had no money, but were in complete happiness

The Poet and His Poetry Dylan Thomas, like T. S. Eliot, baffled his first readers. While Herbert Read. for example, thought that Dylan Thomas wrote "the most absolute poetry of our time". Geoffrey Grigson described Thomas's poetry as "a meaningless hot sprawl of mud". The poet described himself as "a painstaking conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words' '. He said further that lie used "everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the direction I want them to : old tricks, new tricks. puns, portmanteau words, paradox, allusion, slang, rhymes, vowel rhymes. sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will Poets have to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions are all part of the joy". His poetry, he believed, "is the record of my individual struggle From darkness towards some measure of light"

twenty years of his poetic life (1933-53) - He published the first three volumes of Verse in five years: 18 Poems (1 934). Twenty-five poems (1 936). and The Map of Love ( 1939).

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER

Rhetorical devices like parallelism, metaphor, ambiguity, paradox. Refrain - And I am dumb.


Theme - is process natural and creative. Process is an enactment in the immediate present of the dynamic interplay of subject and object. Impersonal nature and man as a person is identified in a process or a cycle of creation and destruction. The process in time is lifted above and beyond-time in language and verse.  


symbols in his poems as (conventional), (2) natural and (3) private. "wax ", a symbol for dead flesh, is a private symbol. Sores or wounds stand for the pain of life. The heart, the navel wound, the sexual parts and the sexual act, Christ, the effects of Time''. 

'AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION'

Critics have observed that Thomas's range of subjects is extremely limited. Love and sex were inseparable in his imagination. As he grew older, sex became a nightmare and love remained a mere slogan. Death, the other important theme, of his poetry preoccupied his imagination from the beginning. The first line is repeated six times in this poem of three stanzas of nine lines each. The first and the last lines of each stanza are the same. It is a line adapted from St. Paul, Romans VI: 9: Death hath no more dominion. Biblical allusions abound in Dy lan Thomass's poems. 


The theme of the poem is traditional John Donne, in a sonnet says: 


One short sleep past, we wake eternally, 
And Death shall be no more;  Death, thou shalt die. 


Shakespeare too had said: And death once dead, there's no more dying then. The Christian myth of resurrection on the Last Day of Judgement is implicit in the poelns. Written by the poet at the age of 19. The poem is innovative in forni. Not a sonnet. 


It is a poem of three nine -line stanzas,of traditional iambic tetrameters. Let us first consider the theme. Man for the poet is man from seed to grave. emphasis on the grave. The tone of the preacher is adopted or minlickcd in this pocm, The making of a poem is also the poet's making of himself. His concern with his ~individual world which he tries to express emotionally).. not with objective detachmel.tr is remarkable. His God is cosmic energy, not the Old Testament God of judgement. We look for consistency of ideas or thought. Thomas's poetry, wc shall be disappointed. How shall we reconcile "And Death shall have no dominion~'. with "After the first death, there is no other ". 


He sounds conventional. but he is not serious, The latter line from "A Refusal to Mourn'' is characteristically ambiguous. The assertion "And death shall have no dominion" asks for the impossible, at least to a sceptic or agnostic reader. The irony and pathos is tragic. In the first stanza, the poet asserts that the dead will be recreated on the Judgement Day. They will.be joined to the wind and stars in a united Creation" 


In the second stanza, the rise of the martyrs from the dead is described. They were tortured in their lifetime and might have lost faith ("Faith in their hands shall snap in two"). The world of the early poetry of Thomas was described by Elder Olson as tragic, not melodramatic. Is this poem serious enough to have a tragic tone?. The faith in resurrection may not be unwavering, but a line likc "brake in the sun till the sun breaks down" expresses it forcefully. 

Poem in October

Notice 
(1) That the poet celebrates his own birthday, 
(2) That birth, life and death are simultaneously present in his imagination and 
(3) that the urge to transcend time and defeat death in art or poetry is intense and paramount. The last line of this poem is memorable and passes Matthew Arnold's touchstone' method of test. 


The other birthday poems by the poet were written 


(1) on his twentieth birthday and 
(2) on his thirty fifth. Thus, in chronological order, the poems are as follows: 


1. Especially when The October Wind (20* birthday) 
2. 'Twenty-Four Years Remind The Tears of My eyes",-(24'~ B'day) 
3. "Poem in October" (30'~ B'Day) 
4. "Poem On His Birthday" (35th B'Day) 

Fern Hill

Fern Hill", the poem, derives its title from the name of a fann which was the home of the poet's aunt, Anne Jones, whose death he mourned in an earlier poein,h.After the Funeral". In "Fern Hill'' the poet remembers the happy holidays he spent there away from Swansea, and idealises the excitement and innocence of childhood. He succeeds in communicating the exhilaration which he fclt as a child.' 


Bough - main branch of the tree
Lilt - a characteristic rising and falling of the voice when speaking; a pleasant gentle accent.
Dingle -  deep wooded valley or dell.
Heyday - the period of a person's or thing's greatest success, popularity, activity, or vigour.
A windfall is a large, and many times unexpected, financial gain—often the result of an inheritance, lawsuit settlement, property sale, salary bonus, or even a winning lottery ticket.
Nightjars - any of a family (Caprimulgidae) of medium-sized long-winged crepuscular or nocturnal birds (such as the whip-poor-wills and nighthawks) having a short bill, short legs, and soft mottled plumage and feeding on insects which they catch on the wing.
Whinnying - (of a horse) make a whinny.

A REFUSAL TO MOURN THE DEATH, BY FIRE, OF A CHILD IN LONDON

The poet is saying that never, until the end of the world and the final return of all things to their original elements, will distort the mourning of the child's death by mourning. One dies but once, and through that death, becomes reunited with the timeless unity of things. 

 

If you found my blog useful please do leave a comment, share with your friends and also check out my Youtube Channel for more informative content - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9jxfCZS_h4AVcj2Ioe7S6Q