Reader Reviews for The Colossus and Other Poems:
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Summary: Plath's model of poetic craft
Comment: In a well-known 1962 radio interview with Peter Orr of the British Council, Sylvia Plath downplayed her achievements in 'The Colossus' by explaining that she was 'bored' with the poems. By this time, she had entered the period of freer forms and dazzling imagery that fueled 'Ariel,' a volume now securing her legacy.
Plath died at a young age and might have changed her mind about 'The Colossus' poems had she lived long enough to reevaluate them. Fortunately, her public sees a great deal of the collection's value, at least in terms of its refinement and precision. Even when disregarding its subject matters, 'The Colossus' can be viewed as a woman's treatise on the poetic art.
First published in 1960, 'The Colossus & Other Poems' offers forty titles, many of which were written at the Yaddo artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and published in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Encounter. The poems do not follow a specific order, but are arranged to supply contrasts in mood. Several of Plath's best known poems, including 'Night Shift,' 'The Colossus,' 'The Disquieting Muses,' 'The Beekeeper's Daughter,' and 'The Stones,' can be found in this 84-page collection.
On the surface, Plath's early poetry looks naïve. Her stanzas are always flush left with capital letters. The number of lines per stanza is usually consistent. Her metrics are flawless. But when examining the poems repeatedly, it becomes clear that Plath's work has manifold meanings; how deeply we see is based on how deeply we're willing to look. Even in simple narratives like 'Sow,' 'The Bull of Bendylaw,' and 'Snakecharmer,' Plath seems to be winking at us through her underlying ideas on human relationships.
Perhaps the strongest element of Plath's verse is its compactness. For such a range of images and emotions, her poems are quite short, rarely lasting beyond two pages. By her mid-to-late twenties, Plath had already disposed of excess, working powerful ideas into taut lines and stanzas. She had also completely mastered techniques such as 'internal' rhyme, alliteration, and enjambment, helped by her love of Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, Auden, and other immortals.
Plath's choice of 'The Colossus' as her focal poem is interesting, since female oppression does not seem a prevailing theme of this volume. 'The Colossus' is a poem of thirty lines, the first-person account of a woman who must serve as caretaker to the Colossus of Rhodes, a crumbling monument for god Helios. This poem foresees the later Plath of 'Daddy,' 'Lady Lazarus,' and 'The Moon and the Yew Tree,' where she openly rebels against a society that has confined women to limited roles.
Signs of the later Plath are also noticeable in poems such as 'Lorelei,' 'The Ghost's Leavetaking,' 'Full Fathom Five,' and 'The Stones.' These poems are intensely personal, stem from Plath's distinctly feminine voice, and seamlessly combine the real with the subconscious. The only factor working against this volume is the repetitiveness of Plath's imagery as her poems roll on: we are shown oceans, the Moon, and rocks a few times too many. Still, this can be forgiven with the variety of form and approach that Plath offers us. Even if we are looking at a sea or rock for the umpteenth time, we are never looking at it in exactly the same way.
'The Colossus & Other Poems' is too frequently judged as a testing ground for 'Ariel' rather than as a mature collection in its own right. The fact that 'Ariel' became a posthumous sensation hasn't helped 'The Colossus' at all, but it has luckily held its ground amongst readers. I have to claim myself as a member of the group who prefers these poems over 'Ariel.' As a person interested in new ways to utilize old ideas, I am fascinated by how Plath used strict forms as a foundation for her modern creative energies.
Those who have read 'The Colossus' may recall a Vintage softcover edition with blue and orange bars on its cover. In 1998, Vintage International made cosmetic changes; while the inside retains its large typeface, the cover is now in orange, black, and cream with a famous photograph of Plath sitting with her typewriter atop a stone barrier in Yorkshire. This edition and past releases are available just about everywhere, along with her 'Ariel' poems, prose, and published journals.
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Summary: Exploring Plath's early work
Comment: Sylvia Plath is well reputed as a poet. Her untimely death, at too early an age, silenced her poetic voice. This book represents one of her early works.
Her poetry is not beautiful or lyric or elegiac. There is a hardness, almost a clinical coldness, to the verses, and some dark themes recur. And some odds poems based on intriguingly selected facts.
Of the latter. . . . A stone coffin from the 4th century AD in Cambridge (England) contains skeletons of a woman, a mouse, and a shrew. The woman's ankle bone was slightly gnawed. Here are a couple lines from "All the Dead Dears."
". . .
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.
These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game. . ."
"The Manor Garden"
"The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A bleu mist is dragging the lake.
. . . .
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. . . ."
"Frog Autumn"
"Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.
The insects are scant, skinny.
In these palustral homes we only
Croak and wither."
And, since I grew up on a farm and--for a time--saw many hogs in our hog house, I cannot resist noting this poem--"Sow."
"God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid...
In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show."
If you are interested in the earlier works of Plath, this is an obvious work to explore. As one comment says on the back cover of the book: "[Plath] steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, supersensitivity and the act of being a poet. She simply writes good poetry."
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Summary: Genius' Magnet
Comment: "Compelled by calamity's magnet/They loiter and stare" begins the poem "Aftermath" by Sylvia Plath in "The Colossus." In this striking collection of living language, Plath gives us a hearty portion of her verbose verse. "The Colossus and Other Poems" was written when Plath was heavy on the thesaurus, and it shows. These poems are so rife with description that one feels the need to read them several times over.
Compared to Ariel, "The Colossus" is meticulous, planned, deliberate. While "Ariel" sparks lingual clusters of abstraction into the brain of the reader, the poems in this collection are deciphered with relative ease. Though gorgeously crafted, the poems are, mostly, straightforward.
Of course, Plath's characteristic grimness is not lost in her more formal work here. Throughout "Colossus" we see glimmers of the darkness that defined her later work. And, as with most of Plath's poetry, the macabre is often moot compared to the dazzling language and visual strength of her writing.
"The Colossus and Other Poems" is a diverse, magnificent collection. From Plath's native New England to mushrooms and sows to "The Colossus" itself, Plath weaved a masterful tapestry of words.
We can't help but "loiter and stare."
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Summary: does not make the art of writing good poems seem easy
Comment: The Colossus," from what I understand, was Plath's first published collection of poetry. During this early phase of Plath's career, she still treated the act of writing poetry as a laborious and painstaking process, often diligently lookig up words in the thesaurus and then inserting many synonyms of one word into a single composition. This rather pedantic attitude toward poetry shows in these poems, many of which devoutly adhere to difficult rhyme schemes (albeit frequently using slant rhymes) and all of which are marked by a studied attention to detail, both visual and sonic. These poems simply don't *soar* the way the free-verse poems in "Ariel" (Plath's second book) do; they are just not as vibrant or as lively as her later work. These are bleak poems, characterized by a wealth of vivid tactile detail, but somewhat lacking in color and movement. Plath frequently uses the terza-rima rhyme scheme that Dante patented, as though to suggest that life, for her, is a slow, laborious plod into (or through?) hell. In this book, Plath shows that she can write good poems, but she does not make the art of writing good poems seem easy.
I do not, however, mean to imply that this is not a useful book for aspiring poets to read. It is, doubtless, a very important book to read if one wishes to understand how Plath developed into the brilliant, oracular voice that spouted "Ariel." And since Sylvia Plath started writing poetry seriously at a very early age, it is perhaps unfair to dismissively refer to this book -- which she published at the ripe old age of 25 -- as her "early work." There are many remarkable things about this book, not the least of which is the way Plath elevates mundane topics (e.g., men working the night shift, or prize pigs) to the level of high poetry, armoring them with an impervious Dante-esque dignity. To Plath, even the smallest things in life are worthy of attention.
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Summary: Unacknowledged Classic
Comment: Not Plaths's most famous book, obviously, but quite arguably her best, Colossus is cool and totally controlled. Here Plath finally refines what she had started doing from teenhood -- please consult the juvenelia in Collected Poems to confirm this. Images of distant objectivity are chosen as pivots for the most intimate meditations, physical and personal. The "I" is often seen as if under a microscope, to a degree beyond what was earlier achieved by her tutor confessional poets such as Robert Lowell. Indeed this may eventually be seen as her lasting poetic achievement -- carrying the confessional theory quickly to its absolute brink -- and this book is where it finally breaks the surface of the water successfully.
Painfully, Plath -- an almost merciless keeper of diaries, journals, and notes -- records here the exact incident of her transformation -- in "The Eye Mote." Perhaps lacking the drama of later poems, it is all the more revealing, heavily sad, doubtless true. And the incident (perhaps half-imagined, half real) has nothing of the cultural or personal overlays one finds in 95% of the Plath literature, pro and con. It has a lot more to do with the theory and practice of confessional poetry itself -- its breath-taking possibilities and vast opportunities for a dreadful slip from its tightrope act.
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