The Colossus

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Guardian (Manchester, England), August 18, 2001, Christina Patterson, "Ted on Sylvia, for the Record," p. R3. Bundtzen also interprets the poem through a feminist lens. She sees it as an illumination of "woman's psyche as it is shaped by a patriarchal culture." She cites Plath's many allusions - to the Oresteia and Greek tragedy - to suggest that the speaker is conflicted about having to exist in the shadow of a father figure, while remaining desperate for it to speak to her. She is unable to declare her individuality in this context, and yet cannot muster the strength to make a change. From this perspective, the poem offers a more universal critique, rather than merely exploring the author's personal past.

The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit (for children), illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1996. I noticed another reviewer on here had commented that they would not have known when any of Plath's poems had ended if it wasn't for the fact there was a large blank space at the end - and honestly I had to agree. I didn't feel like there was a great finality or rhythm to most of the poems contained here. I also found that a lot of the poems, particularly nearer the beginning of the collection, focused a little too much on nature and fairytale whimsy for my personal tastes. Van Dyke, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993.Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996. Editor) American Poetry Now (supplement number 2 to Critical Quarterly,) Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1961. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.

The speaker appears to gain something from the time she spends there. She sits there, out of the wind.In this 1959 poem, which gave its title to Plath’s first published collection of poetry, she tries to grapple with the legacy and memory of her father, who died when she was eight years old. The poem is notoriously full of abstruse and complicated imagery, which leave it open to myriad interpretations, although most of them center somewhat around her father. (For this reason, it is often discussed in conjunction with “Daddy,” a later poem on the same subject.) Critics have seen echoes of incest-awe in the text, but the text hardly makes the nature of the relationship explicit. No matter what feelings one attaches to the speaker, its brilliantly evocative imagery and mood are remarkable. The speaker crouches in the ear of a giant statue that overlooks the world, a powerful, multi-layered, and disturbing image that many can relate to even if their relationship with their fathers are not quite akin to Plath's. Critical Survey, September, 2000, James Booth, "Competing Pulses: Secular and Sacred in Hughes, Larkin, and Plath," p. 3. In the first few stanzas, Plath seems exasperated with her father’s monumentality, expressing her fear that she “shall never get [him] put together entirely.” Further, she is dismissive of what she perceives as smugness in his desire to be an oracle, when all he can produce is unpleasant animal noise. Considering the emotions at display here, it is unclear why she would bother to scale the statue.

Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941-1968, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987. Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1971, Random House (New York, NY), 1972. Born in 1932 in Boston, Plath was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor, Otto Plath, and one of his students, Aurelia Schober. The poet’s early years were spent near the seashore, but her life changed abruptly when her father died in 1940. Some of her most vivid poems, including the well-known “ Daddy,” concern her troubled relationship with her authoritarian father and her feelings of betrayal when he died. Financial circumstances forced the Plath family to move to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Aurelia Plath taught advanced secretarial studies at Boston University. Sylvia Plath was a gifted student who had won numerous awards and had published stories and poetry in national magazines while still in her teens. She attended Smith College on scholarship and continued to excel, winning a Mademoiselle fiction contest one year and garnering a prestigious guest editorship of the magazine the following summer.The reason I mention this occasion is that as much as I wanted to understand Sylvia Plath, this book of poetry only became accessible once I began to understand Linda's ability to open herself to others. Plath bared herself in a way in which I not only felt awkward and shy, but with a power that initially made me feel like I was sitting too close to the stage, as it were. Here was a woman who wrote without any apology for who she was. In my estimation she offended the very ones who felt obliged to judge and evaluate her. Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2000, Marjorie Miller, "Sylvia Plath's Uncensored Journals, to Be Published in April, Shed Light on Her Dark Moods and Tumultuous Marriage," p. A2. In Plath’s final poems, wrote Charles Newman in his The Art of Sylvia Plath,“death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive. Perhaps it is because there is no longer dialogue, no sense of ‘Otherness’—she is speaking from a viewpoint which is total, complete. Love and Death, all rivals, are resolved as one within the irreversibility of experience. To reverse Blake, the Heart knows as much as the Eye sees.” Alvarez believed that “the very source of [Plath’s] creative energy was, it turned out, her self-destructiveness. But it was, precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power. So, though death itself may have been a side issue, it was also an unavoidable risk in writing her kind of poem. My own impression of the circumstances surrounding her eventual death is that she gambled, not much caring whether she won or lost; and she lost.” Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (radio play; broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation in 1962; limited edition), Turret Books, 1968.

Seamus Heaney. "The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath." in The Government of the Tongue. NY: Faber, 1988, p. 154. New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3. Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1988.Enjambment is another important technique in this poem. Its seen a few times as the poet cuts off lines before their conclusion and creates a new stanza or line. For example, the transition between lines three and four of the first stanza and lines three and four of the second stanza. Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990. The Colossus is the coldest collection of summer poetry you will ever read. I’m certain this paradox was intentional. Moles, maggots, cadavers, suicides, dead snakes, dead things in the surf, dead things on the shore, dead things out in the water, etc. There were times I was bit numbed out by all that dead stuff. For the first third of the collection, I initially felt the influence of Robert Lowell to be obvious in some of the poems (“Point Shirley,” “Hardcastle Crags”). Now I’m not so sure. Yes, Plath studied under Lowell, and I know as a result I’m connecting dots with the seashore linking the two. But Plath takes the seashore poems into her own dark places, again and again, so that by the time you reach the late “Mussel Hunter at Lake Harbor,” you yourself (to your horror) are fingering the nasty things on the beach: