43. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

            When I was living and teaching in Devon, England I was asked to teach some of the poetry of Sylvia Plath.  The head of the department came in and talked for awhile about Plath’s life and told some nonsense about American’s having detention facilities during the war for the Germans as we did for the Japanese and that that was somehow a fear of the Plath family due to some German ancestry. The department head was an Irish woman who viewed herself as foreign to England just as I was as an American (she must have forgotten that Northern Ireland, like England, is part of the UK). At that time in my life I would never have corrected her in front of the students (might not even now) but after she had gone I took it upon myself to tell my students that the largest ethnic group in the United States is, in fact, German and not (simply because we speak it) English and that it would be impossible for us to have had detention facilities for 40% of our population.

            All of this got me thinking more about Sylvia Plath and how the English fully accept her as an English poet because she married an Englishman and lived there for some time (and died there). But as an American living in Devon, I realized that she was every bit as American as ever and that that nationality which you are born with can not simply be swept away by leaving your homeland. As an example I turn to her poem "Blackberrying." The setting is very English but the berries are obviously American or they would be called bramble-berries.

            Sylvia Plath’s poetry is, indeed, a gift to both Americans and British alike. Its sense of confession can sometimes make you feel as if you’ve been slapped across the face while at other times it can bring you to tears. When you know about her life, her tempestuous relationship with her philandering husband, Ted Hughes and her suicide, you can’t help but feel a deep anguish. When I taught her poetry to my English students I liked to joke about the different aspects of our nationalities, that the English are prone to keep a stiff upper lip and put up with things while Americans tend to believe they can improve anything and everything. The house we were living in had a cooker (cook stove) that’s oven jets needed a good banging to get the gas through them. I told my students that Ms. Plath was frustrated with her husband’s “make do” attitude with a faulty cooker so she decided to bake anyway. Because she wanted her children to have some good old fashioned American cookies she decided to fix that oven, but because of the risks involved, to protect the children she taped off all the possible escape routes for the gas. In the end it killed her. Of course I was only joking and my students seemed somewhat entertained by the joke allowing a sense of humor at the expense of both nationalities (both being stubborn in some way, I suppose).

            I can’t help but feel grateful for Sylvia Plath, not only for her poetry but for her American presence in Devon that was still very palpable to me even though she died about the time I was born. Her life in Devon and New England, however difficult, provided me with a sense of comfort at being American even in the foreign land of my ancestors where the consanguinity of my British brethren could not.