18 Poetry: The 1940s to the Present

i Poets' Prose

Two of the year's more significant books are not critical per se, but posthumously published prose by two poets: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (Anchor) and Allen Ginsberg's Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 1952–1995 (Harper Collins). Each greatly deepens our understanding of these inescapably signal mid-century American poets, writers who might fairly be said to best represent two of the primary impulses in post-1940s American verse.

Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Journals does not exactly come out of left field. Francis McCullough's earlier edition of The Journals of Sylvia Plath drew much attention, and though greatly abridged and expurgated it has been a primary source for Plath studies since its publication in 1982. Here finally, however, we have the real deal. As Karen V. Kukil tells us in her concise preface to the new volume, Plath fairly rigorously kept journals from age 11 until her death. Working from papers in the Plath Collection at Smith College, in her 732-page edition Kukil gives us the poet's "adult journals from 1950 to 1962 . . . an exact transcription of twenty-three original manuscripts" covering "Plath's student years at Smith College and Newham College, Cambridge, her marriage to Ted Hughes, and two years of teaching and writing in New England." According to Kukil, save for obscuring a few names "to protect the privacy of living individuals" and the deletion of a dozen sentences, the edition is complete, expanding McCullough's version by about two-thirds.

Since the bulk of these entries cover the decade in which Plath was growing into her maturity, there are obviously inconsistencies and conflicting truths here as she tries to find her way in the world as both a human being and a poet. Entries swing from a kind of Whitmanesque expansiveness ("I love people. Everybody. . . . With me, the present is forever") to Dickinson-like interiority ("You are crucified by your own limitations. Your blind choices cannot be changed; they are now irrevocable"). Certainly many passages are painful to read ("I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight. My mother killed the only man who'd love me steady through life"; "She came home crying like an angel one night and woke me up and told me Daddy was gone, he was what they called dead"; "How do I express my hate for my mother? . . . She is a murderess of maleness") and of course one at times feels a bit the voyeur. And while there are likely no huge new revelations in this new edition, there is much that serves as both confirmation of and corrective to the myth. From the start it is clear that Plath is an immensely talented young writer, and that while she suvers occasional moments of self-doubt she is not only fairly consistently laser like in her evort to become a poet of the first rank, she is generally (as many of those who knew her best have always insisted) tough as nails. She certainly wants to make of poetry a career, and yet she seems to believe above all else that "writing is a religious act . . . money isn't why you sit down at the typewriter." We are reminded in some detail that her crucial relationship with her at least equally talented and charismatic husband, Ted Hughes, was not so darkly reductive as has been so often proposed: "I married a real poet, and my life is redeemed: to love, serve & create"; "I knew what I wanted when I saw it. . . . I didn't have to compromise and accept a sweet balding insurance salesman or an impotent teacher or a dumb conceited doctor like my mother said I would"; Hughes "has a soul, he has sex as strong as it comes. . . . I love his work and he fascinates me every minute." And in remarks like "[it is] dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out . . . am likely to become a mere accessory," the poet often seems remarkably self-aware.

The Unabridged Journals closes with various...