What do you think of Sylvia Plath's body of work?

yeah her body's pretty hot

I read The Bell Jar after spending the majority of 2012 in a psychiatric hospital.

It was shit.

I think it can certainly be said that Sylvia Plath deserves as much honour as can be bestowed upon a writer by the local high school poetry prize council.

Another low-quality Anglophone free verse 'creator' who conquered world fame due to writing in a language which even the silliest of the stupid can understand.

I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it.

its literally just a roastie who gets "depressed" because all of the guys interested in her are too short

Can you give me an example? I've never been impressed, but would like to believe she had more than a few good ones.

You don't get it.

She skimped on all the good bits. The only okay-ish part of the book was the sort of surreal beginning where the protag, can't remember name or whatever, wasn't well in New York.

The rest felt like that bit of filling in you do when you want to get to a good scene but have to build it up first -- only the good scene never came.

She had a lot to work with. There is a tremendous amount of material in the psychiatric hospital setting. The devastating loss of autonomy. The feeling of going from being free to do as you wished to living a life dictated by doctors and nurses, every hour of the day. Enforced timetables, medication changes that would be made without your input and could lead to horrific side effects. Watching other patients be dragged, kicking and screaming, into another room by four nurses and a couple of psych health workers to be given their medication by injection for refusing it. The weird and often frightening interpersonal relationships between patients. Interacting with people who were manic, or having paranoid delusions but had somehow latched on to you as a friend, the depressed and the anxious opening their veins with blunt butter knives in the patient kitchen, the people with eating disorders vomiting into the rubbish bins in the laundry room and covering it up with food wrappers so they weren't caught. Someone overdosing on drugs they had managed to secret away, and having an ambulance pull up the driveway to rush them away to a different hospital. Being called into the main group therapy room in the middle of the night to be told a patient who had left four months earlier was dead, they'd hung themselves.

There is a lot of raw, visceral fear and hopelessness in those places. She glossed over it. My disappointment was immense.

A psych ward is not the point of the novel. The bell jar metaphor is, the fact that you suddenly have this thing distorting the very way you experience reality in a very negative alienating way, then another day it lifts and then you putter along with the understanding that one day you'll be back in there. If you want the inhumanity of a psych ward there's always kesey or some shit, that isn't the point of the bell jar at all.

To me it was more about her fall into hopelessness than a case study on psychiatric homes.

Doesn't Magic Mountain take place in one? have you read that?

>There is a lot of raw, visceral fear and hopelessness in those places.

your experience =/= others' experiences

hot

this guy gets it

I felt uncomfortable during the sex scene in the bell jar. I thought she was pure

Maybe you would've liked it more if you weren't a fucking psycho

she is anything but

I mean, I don't think I'll change your mind, but poem that really demonstrates how there's more to her than meets the eye is "Elm".

If you don't read it carefully, it just seems confessional. It's actually a dialogue between the speaker and a personified tree, the tree doesn't actually talk about being a tree, it talks about being personified. The poem becomes about the relationship between the poet and her environment. It's pretty neat.

I didn't care for the Bell Jar

Her poetry is accomplished, imaginative, and innovative. I'm not sure what else you could want.

Hm, do you mean you would also commit suicide in the same way she did?

>There is a lot of raw, visceral fear and hopelessness in those places. She glossed over it. My disappointment was immense.

Isn't it funny though that a depressed (in a stale, unhysteric sort of way) person might simply not be able to observe those things, nevermind vividly describing them afterwards? So the book kind of is mediocre because it well depicts the mediocre state of a depressed mind.

I mean it's not Girl, Interrupted. The author had thoroughly blurred vision and never really recovered. Imagine reading an unedited book by a fingerless person with typos.

I don't think that's a picture of Garth Brooks.

shes such a qt
tfw no sylvia plath gf

Any Plath people here who can locate a PDF or something of her thesis on Dostoevsky?

Seconding this

>The UK cover of a new collection of letters is only the latest to show the acclaimed poet as blond, beaming and in a skimpy outfit. But presenting female writers as mere sex symbols diminishes their literary achievements

theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/sep/28/sylvia-plath-bikini-shot-its-time-to-stop-sexualising-a-serious-author-to-sell-books

ted hughes was a much better poet.

If you think Plath is free verse you have a tin ear.

why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food?

Not him, but frankly I think her first attempt was the more intense. Crawling underneath the basement to die seems seppuku af.

These posts are wise. But what do you suppose she was like in real life? I mean everybody has problems and unhealthy attitudes in their own way, or am I wrong. If you were in her graduating class do you think you'd find her interesting to talk to? Personally, some of he best (but also some of the dullest) conversations I've had were with persons at one point in their life diagnosed with depression.

Not trying to turn her into the next Anne Frank. But I'd like to buy her a beer and talk books. In hell.

Maybe all that fear and hopelessness was glossed over because the narrator refused to confront it.

If I were writing about, say, clinical depression, I would have the narrator be embarrassed about and looked for every reason to avoid saying anything related to it.

More like I'd wanna see her body AT work

I'm gay but let's just say I'd like read her works and reflect on them if you know what I mean

>everybody has problems and unhealthy attitudes in their own way
No, of course. I'm not saying she was crazy or even just not normal (I maybe overstated that). My point was only that she represents the female experience at its worst, which makes her a poor example of the everywoman, which feminists tend to put her as. I'm sure she was a fascinating person to have a beer with ... intelligent lonely people tend to be like that.

Thanks.You're right on both counts. It's not for me, but it does show her talent.

This woman, on tumblr she is everything.

hyhy i recognize that meme

Its embarrassing for everyone who brings her up here. Juveniles.

This is sadly the case.

This woman, in my country she is everything

Shit. I had to read one of her poems for a college class and it was litterally "all men are hitler, also fuck my dad". The ultamate irony of her life is that after all the feminist crap she killed herself with a kitchen appliance

She gets misrepresented a lot by landwhale radfems. Her most famous poems were about the cold, uncaring forces of nature.

Why are men so insecure?

A local SJW in my city is organising a Plath conference, makes me hesitant to read her

Very overrated. Fetishized by angsty teenage girls since she died by putting her head into a gas oven. Actually sat next to Ted Hughes on a transatlantic flight in the last year of his life, which was interesting since I was studying her at the time.

Whats wrong with social justice?

>Why are men so insecure?
I'm guessing you are female? I graduated UG in early 00s, and while the political nonsense/SJW garbage was creeping in, it wasn't overwhelming yet. At the time, I was able to appreciate female writers/poets like Emily Brontë (never a fan of charlotte, still have my Emily poster I kept over my bed in my dorm), Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, the truly great females writers who deserve their place in the cannon. While I was in grad school, it began changing to where female writing was included as "mandatory diversity" and they tried to force hack like Maya Angelou down students' throats.

In short, they took a university system that had reached reached its pinnacle in the early 1900s and eroded it away to where students were FORCED to read "diversity for diversity's sake" rather than quality of the work and there was a justified backlash.

overrated /=/ bad
nor does it matter what her fan base is like

Ok, let me be more blunt. She was at best an average writer/poet of which the 7 sisters produced many. Her fan base comes into play because her her mystique (and thus popularity) stems from her method of death and thus the reason she is a tragic heroine for girls who used to read her poetry and maybe cut themselves a few times with a razor. These same girls now deal with the angst by taking testosterone injections and declaring themselves "men" or one of the other ever expanding categories on the "gender spectrum."

You have to go back.

Are the letters actually worth reading? I like some of her work.

Am I the only one on Veeky Forums that hasn't met one of these transgenders in real life yet?

Lucky you.

One of my half siblings is one of them, and they're absolutely intolerable.

another example of a nice body, terrible literature.

He was the bullman earlierm
King of the dish, my lucky animal.
Breathing was easy in his airy holding.
The sun sat in his armpit.
Nothing went moldy. The little invisibles
Waited on him hand and foot.
The blue sisters sent me to another school.
Monkey lived under the dunce cap.
He kept blowing me kisses.
I hardly knew him.

He won't be got rid of:
Memblepaws, teary and sorry,
Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's unfamiliar.
A dustbin's enough for him.
The dark's his bone.
Call him any name, he'll come to it.

Mud-sump, happy sty face.
I've married a cupboard of rubbish.
I bed in a fish puddle.
Down here the sky is always falling.
Hogwallow's at the window.
The star bugs won't save me this mouth.
I housekeep in Time's gut-end
Among emmets and mollusks,
Duchess of Nothing,
Hairtusk's bride.

She's pleb filter.