![]() ![]() Rollyson makes much-too much, perhaps-of a dream Plath had three years later, in which Marilyn appeared to her “as a kind of fairy godmother,” giving her a manicure and promising her “a new, flowering life.” ![]() She posed in a swimsuit for the university newspaper. She had fashionable hair, man-eater lipstick, and a wobbly sense of momentum about her. Carl Rollyson’s American Isis declares her “the Marilyn Monroe of modern literature.” This is not as daft as it sounds: When Plath arrived in England in 1955, on a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University, she was, at least to English eyes, ablaze with American glamour. This year has already brought us two new biographies, two more runs at the imago. She did, it’s true, pack into her three decades a remarkable number of reboots and re-selvings-transformation, and its lethal opposite, was her theme-but even so … Can’t we leave her alone? She has been posthumously psychoanalyzed, politicized, astrologized. The ’70s enthroned her as a feminist martyr. Out of these elements, endless constructions and conjurations. Upon her death, the bulk of her work-including the completed manuscript of Ariel-was still unknown to readers. In her lifetime, she published just one book of poetry ( The Colossus and Other Poems), one novel ( The Bell Jar), and a few stories in magazines. A Massachusetts girlhood a precocious literary ascent interrupted by an early nervous breakdown a decampment to England marriage to-and separation from-the poet Ted Hughes suicide. ![]() Her short life has been trampled and retrampled under the biographer’s hoof, her opus viewed and skewed through every conceivable lens of interpretation. Fifty years after she killed herself, we find her vital, nasty, invincible, red-and-white poetry sitting in a region of cultural near-exhaustion. The light is blue.” That’s the Plath-world, freakishly bleak, exerting its tractor-beam fascination on American culture. “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary / The trees of the mind are black. Her whole history is in there somehow: the shining prizewinner with a death obsession, the supercharged, comical/terrible talent whose memory is the lid of a sarcophagus. It's interesting that the speaker chooses to use this symbol of thriving life in a poem that's so focused on ruin and death.Her name, at this point, is almost onomatopoeic: the elegantly coiled, haute-American Sylvia, poised and serpentine, and then the Germanic exhalation of Plath, its fatal flatness like some ruptured surface resealing itself.So, the shape of it is actually a whole lot like an ear canal.A cornucopia is one of those kinda curvy, cone-shaped things that you usually see spilling over with the fruits of the harvest. The description of the ear canal as a "cornucopia" is pretty great, in our humble opinion.The speaker has taken us through her day of work and now we see how she spends her nights, taking shelter from the wind in the statue's ear.Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind, Whatever it is, the speaker again gets across the idea that her father's death was accompanied by some major-league devastation. ![]()
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