“Letter to a Purist”: Shaking Up Virginal Vernacular

Plath’s “Letter to a Purist” has been dated November 19, 1956 by scholar Nancy D. Hargrove. In the poem, Plath references the giant statue, Colossus of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (CP, 36). The “Cloud-cuckoo” is a reference to Aristophanes, and this phrase is also seen in her 1958 poem, “The Ghost’s Leavetaking.”  The Ancient Greek poet Aristophanes used this same expression in his play, The Birds, to mock the politics of Athens. Plath’s use of “Cloud-cuckoo” both references the original and takes on the modern meaning of unrealistic perfection.
On July 9, 1956, Greece experienced a 7.8 magnitude earthquake causing severe damage, 53 deaths, and triggering the most damaging tsunami in a century, affecting the entire Aegean Sea. Plath would have known about Greece’s land, politics, and more from a June 1955 cover story in The Atlantic called “Greece Today.” We know that she read this issue, as it was one in which her friend Nat LaMar[1] published his “Creole Love Song,” a story that Plath raved over in a letter to her mother (LH, 192).
 The Colossus of Rhodes statue is thought to have been placed straddling the harbor of the Greek island Rhodes, until it came tumbling down in an earthquake in 226 BC. The “Purist” in Plath’s title is Katharevousa, meaning, “Purist language,” a movement increasingly adopted by Greece for official and formal purposes in the 20th century, and especially popular in the mid-1950s. Plath probably compared Greece’s linguistic efforts to the close-mindedness of Germany’s national volkgeist, a conservative pride and protection of the German language and culture. Katharevousa is a conservative form of Modern Greek, viewed as a compromise between Ancient Greek and the modern vernacular of the time. It conceived of the Greek language as it might have been, evolving untainted by external influences. Plath mocked this improbable notion in her poem.
[1] Plath’s “dearest friend in Cambridge” (LH, 211), Nathaniel LaMar was an African-American student and also friendly with Plath’s brother Warren. A talented fiction writer, in 1957 he awarded an Atlantic Grant in Fiction to assist him in completion of his first novel.

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