History and a Case for Prescience: Introduction on Short Studies of Sylvia Plath’s 1956 Poems

[An earlier version of this essay was first published in Plath Profiles, Volume 7, 2014 with analyses of the 1956 poems by Sylvia Plath]
 “[Y]ou are being sounded and unpicked, and charted and reduced to your parts. However your new veiled Southpaw approach I should think is a match for their craft.”
–Letter to Sylvia Plath from Ted Hughes, October 6 and 8, 1956[1]
Ted Hughes knew that his wife Sylvia Plath had a few tricks in her poetry, and that her words were not always what they seemed to be. In my work in Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one, (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), I reveal new interpretations and multi-layered dimensions of Plath’s poetry through the use of the tarot and Qabalah. It was only natural that I should go back to explore Plath’s early work and see if she had done the same in The Collected Poems, especially those written before her mystical masterpiece of Ariel.
Critics of Ted Hughes have complained that Hughes, who edited Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems, considered Plath’s work before 1956, when the two came together as a couple, as “juvenilia.” Many see this as Hughes giving himself credit for mentoring Plath, and his discounting her earlier work because it did not have his stamp of influence upon it.
In his introduction to The Collected Poems, Hughes admitted, “One can see here, too, how exclusively her writing depended on a supercharged system of inner symbols and images, an enclosed cosmic circus. If that could have been projected visually, the substance and patterning of these poems would have made very curious mandalas. As poems, they are always inspired high jinks, but frequently quite a bit more.” He continued, “I worked closely with her and watched the poems being written” (CP, 16). Viewing Plath’s early work, pre-,and post-1956 through the same mystical framework from which my interpretations of Plath’s Ariel are structured, it is evident that her pre-1956 poems lack these multiple meanings and that Hughes was correct in his division of this work from her later poetry. Some poems written after Hughes’ appearance in Plath’s life still did not make the grade. This is the case for Plath’s poem “Aerialist,” written on May 30, 1956, according to her pocket calendar.[2]
It appears that Plath first began to layer meanings in her work, starting with “Conversation Among the Ruins,” a poem she wrote before her involvement with Hughes. In this poem, Plath uses a technique that she would develop to perfection in her Ariel poems of 1962 and after.
I have discussed my process of decoding Plath’s Ariel work in other Plath Profiles volumes[3] and in Fixed Stars Govern a Life,[4] so I shall not repeat it here. [Please email me at [email protected] if you are interested in getting a PDF of the now out-of-print Fixed Stars Govern a Life for just $5 USD. The Decoding Sylvia Plath books are still available on Amazon.com]. In 1956, Plath was not yet an expert in expanding meanings within her work, and this is why her early work feels good, is perfect in rhythm and meter, yet most acknowledge that these earlier poems are not her most significant. In The Collected Poems, Hughes edited and changed some poem’s order. Scholars have already identified that Hughes repositioned some of Plath’s poems outside of their credited years. Why? Because Hughes later imposed that same Ariel mystical structure upon The Collected Poems, a framework that he and Plath used in all of their work and one which would ultimately lead to Plath posthumously winning the Pulitzer Prize. Some of her best juvenilia, most notably, “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” was left out of The Collected Poems entirely because it did not fit the mystical template. Likewise, “Aerialist,” written on May 30, 1956, was also excluded in the 1956 poems for the same reason.
My interpretations are out of the sequence initially published in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. In earlier Plath Profiles articles, I arranged my short studies of each in the chronological order of their writing. The poems are searchable by title but not in exact order on this website.
1956 was when Plath and Hughes met, married, and went on their honeymoon to Benidorm in Alicante, Spain. Plath’s poems that are believed to clearly reference Benidorm are: “Southern Sunrise,” “Alicante Lullaby,” “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” “Fiesta Melons,” “Spider,” “The Goring,” “The Beggars,” “Departure,” and “The Other Two.” Hughes placed all of these poems but “The Other Two” in the 1956 section of The Collected Poems. He did not group them together, most likely because he adhered to Plath’s mystical structure and because the themes stretch far beyond Benidorm. You will see from my short analyses on this website that calling these “Benidorm poems” is missing their creative value altogether. Sylvia Plath was a poetic genius, and this genius was built and practiced in the layering of meanings, beginning here in the 1956 collection.
Important:  Unfortunately, I am unable to share the poems in full due to copyright restrictions, so please search for the poem or crack open your copy of The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath to properly reference these analyses. A belief in the occult is not necessary to understand these interpretations of Plath’s early work. A simple guideline is to cast the time of the poem’s writing against personal, academic, and news events of Plath’s day, often recorded in her calendar, letters, and journals.
Some of these analyses show the fascinating accuracy with which Plath described a future event. I do not tell the reader what to believe, but it is a case for Plath’s self-proclaimed premonitions, which seem to have been greater than her own awareness of them. With this guide, Plath’s 1956 poems are explained here as they are models for news events, whether or not one is well-read on the subject of mysticism.
It should not be overlooked that Plath said to her mother in a letter on April 25, 1955:
“I want to write at least ten good news poems….” 
Politics of the day mattered to Plath, and we must not forget that Plath proclaimed to Peter Orr in a famous interview that she was “rather political” (Orr).
[1] From The Letters of Ted Hughes, Selected and Edited by Christopher Reid, 2007, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Page 64. A copy of this letter may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University -Bloomington.
[2] Plath’s pocket calendar entry for May 30, 1956 reads: “Spent morning perversely caught in throes of nightmare poem ‘aerialist.” This calendar may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington. “Aerialist” may have been inspired by the 1956 movie “Trapeze,” starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobrigida.
[3] See my articles in Plath Profiles 2, 3, 4, and 5.
[4] Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one, by Julia Gordon-Bramer. (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press)
In closing, I will be working on this site for a while, uploading each year of my Early Poems work as I get to it. I have been sitting on it for so long, doing little with it, and now it is time. Please forgive if it is less formal than a journal publication. Feel free to write me or leave comments on any of this work if it moves you, or if you reference it in your own work. Please also let me know if you spot any errors or if references to something are lacking and I will get right on it. It has been a fascinating experience returning to Plath’s early work and seeing it with new eyes. Plath’s skills of applying mysticism to her work had not been fully developed in 1956, although she had accomplished a great deal with layered meanings since her juvenilia. Historical events and dates are verifiable. Whether you believe that some of these are examples of Sylvia Plath’s premonitions is up to you.
-jgb
Julia Gordon-Bramer is the author of Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press). She teaches graduate-level creative writing at Lindenwood University, St. Louis, Missouri, and in 2013 the Riverfront Times voted her St. Louis’ Best Local Poet. She intends to explain Plath’s 1957 poems in the next issue of Plath Profiles.


Works Cited:
Lawrence, D.H.  The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Volume One. Cambridge University Press. 2002.
Orr, Peter. “A 1962 Sylvia Plath interview with Peter Orr” from The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery. London: Routledge (1966).
Web: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htmLast accessed: 23 January, 2014.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel, the Restored Edition. 2004. HarperCollins.
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home, Correspondence 1950-1963. Selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath. First HarperPerennial Edition 1992.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. 2008. HarperPerennial Modern Classics.  First published in 1960 by Harper-Collins.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. By Karen V. Kukil.  First Anchor Books Edition.