of a new nature

The nature poem. So inscribed, so written, so set into the tradition of poetry that it can look like an arcane code. But it is not arcane. In fact, the nature poem is volatile: an accurate register of cultural and historic change. Before the Industrial Revolution it was a pastoral poem; and after a pessimistic one. It has always been there, in the center of the action. Like other poetic conventions, it has its roots in deeply human things. Change those things, alter that angle, and the roots will shift, ready to be put somewhere else.

I believe Plath—the other Plath—changed the nature poem. She shifted its course. She re-directed its historic energy. Ariel may seem a slim text to argue with. Then again, many of the shape-changing texts of nature poetry—whether The Lyrical Ballads or North of Boston—are modest, apparently unimposing single volumes. Unimposing that is, until you read them.

—Eavan Boland, “The Other Sylvia Plath,” A Journey with Two Maps (Norton, 2011)

engaging tongue and ear

Tonight I read Yeats aloud for about an hour, and I shall do this. An hour in the morning and an hour at night. Up to the inventing of Caxton’s press, and for most people long after that, all reading was done aloud….Eliot says the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can….Silent reading only employs the parts of the brain which are used for vision. Not all the brain. This means a silent reader’s literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used in reading aloud—tongue and ear.

—Ted Hughes in a letter to Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar and Giroux, 1956), selected and edited by Christopher Reid.

voice overlord

They called her ‘confessional’ in order to silence her. [Thinking of Plath.]