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Is there a shaman in Sylvia? Sylvia’s redemptive Imagination
Ananya Ghoshal
“Cold glass how you insert yourself
Between myself and myself
I scratch like a cat
The blood that runs is a dark fruitAn effect, a cosmetic.
You smile
No, it is not fatal.” (Sylvia Plath, “The Other”)
1
Sylvia Plath, diagnosed with an acute manic depressive behavior and bipolar disorder,
is often reduced to and recognized as a morbid and suicidal poet rather than a mystic. It is
impossible to deny that the feminist and suicidal trajectories of Plath's mental picture take us
deeply into her poetry but also often prove too reductive a preoccupation with Plath as a
1
Personal typed pages of poet & author Sylvia Plath's work coupled with imagery of the artist Rebecca Star
Butler. See- http://www.flickr.com/photos/rococo/224585635/
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victim. There exists something hidden at the substructure of her writing which is inadequately
described even by the poems themselves. She confronted death and "otherness," but what
were the ultimate terms of the confrontation?
To achieve a philosophical context of her vision, I have turned to Ted Hughes who once
remarked that Sylvia possessed the qualities of a shaman,
“In her poetry . . . she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to
the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men.”
The Jungian notion of the shaman is of “a primitive medicine man who gains access to the
underworld of the psyche and the realm of his tribe's mythos through an initiation which
usually involves a ritual dismemberment and rebirth.” The shaman does not undergo an
actual dismemberment but it is rather a psychotic episode.2 This paper attempts an analysis of
Plath’s poetry from this perception of a transformative ritual – like a shaman's
dismemberment and resurrection through the ritual death of the psyche and its eventual
recovery. 3
The word shaman, according to the Hungarian anthropologist Mihály Hoppál is the
Turkic-Tungus word for a traditional healer and spirit guide found in Turkic-Mongol areas of
Northern Asia such as Siberia and Mongolia, and translates as ‘he or she who knows’ (from
the Tungusic root “sa” – “to know” as in the French word savoir and the Spanish saber to
designate a Wise One or One Who Sees.) The word has passed from Sanskrit (śramana –
ascetic) through Pali (śamana), Chinese (sha men), Tungusic (sămán), Turkik-Tungusic
(shaman), Russian and German into English. The origins of shamanism may well go back
4,500 years or more and involves a path or paths to knowledge, gained through rituals,
ceremonies, prayers, meditation, trials and tests. The shaman is a visionary, prophet, healer,
2
Robert S. Robbins’s essay on Sylvia Plath was the first inspiration for me to deal at length with the concept of
the shaman –poet in Sylvia. See- http://www.geocities.com/rrobbins.geo/plath.htm
3
Judith Kroll's book Chapters In A Mythology: The Poetry Of Sylvia Plath discusses in detail the way Plath
developed her own kind of mythology to explain her bouts of depression and euphoria. Kroll, argues that Sylvia
viewed her nervous breakdown as a shaman's dismemberment and rebirth through ritual death of the psyche and
recovery, "The dispersed 'stones' of the speaker's shattered self are gathered together and reconstructed,
reenacting the myths of Dionysus (who is alluded to in 'Maenad'), Osiris, and other gods who undergo
dismemberment and resurrection." Kroll points out how Sylvia Plath made frequent enquiries regarding the
archetypal shamanic/author figure of Orpheus in her poems to uncover the psychic depth of the human
unconscious and its constant making/remaking.
161
ceremonialist and a psychotherapist. “The Shaman”, writes the religious historian Mercia
Eliade, is “a medicine man, priest, and psycho pomp. He cures illness. He directs the
communal sacrifices and he escorts the souls of the dead to the outer world” and is “above
all, a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself,” through a process
of initiation, “the schema [of which] is suffering, death and resurrection.”4 A religious expert
in the art of psychic healing, both for individual primitives and for society, a shaman
undergoes ecstatic psychic ascents to heaven and descents to hell, with all manner of related
physiological pain, to acquire an elixir or healing power for patients. Whether literal or
metaphorical, shamans frequently achieve their status by way of extreme personal trauma and
out-of-body experiences. Eliade emphasizes several times in Shamanism that what is really
central to the shamanic experience is undergoing of concrete psychological processes of
death, dismemberment and resurrection: a process similar to that of an initiation rite, except
that the shaman experiences it repeatedly, whenever the psychic health of the individual or
the society demands. (Scigaj, 90) Undergoing this initiation into the multi-layered world of
spirits, a shaman learns the methods of trance and soul retrieval, and becomes, in Eliade's
recurring phrase, a "technician of the sacred,” a “Master of Ecstacy”; of ex-stasis (from the
Greek, meaning outside the normal stasis of consciousness). From a state of waking sleep he
wakes up to true reality, the reality of the nagual5 or the reality of imagination. In civilized
societies the shaman is primarily the guardian of existing collective ritual and tradition; a
repository of the knowledge its culture's history, both sacred and secular. Joan Halifax, in
Shamanic Voices, writes:
It is the shaman who weaves together the ordinary world that is lived in and
the philosophical image of the cosmos that is thought of. Human existence,
suffering, and death are rendered by shamans into a system of philosophical,
psychological, spiritual, and sociological symbols that institutes a moral order
by resolving ontological paradoxes and dissolving existential barriers, thus
eliminating the most painful and unpleasant aspects of human life. The
perfection of the timeless past, the paradise of a mythological era, is an
4
In A Match to the Heart" by Gretel Ehrlich writes-“Death is a dark thing, but it is also an illumination....Ritual
death followed by resurrection stands for the death of ego. It is the hero's journey and the teacher's...as well as
any shaman's or healer's.”
5
The word “nagual” belongs to the Nahuatl language spoken by the people of Tehotihuacan, the Toltecs, Aztecs
and many other indigenous groups of the past and present in Mexico and even some regions of Central America.
Nagual is half of the reality in which we live and half of our own nature.
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162
existential potential in the present. And the shaman, through sacred action,
communicates this potential to all.
Shamanic practices occur, with wide variation, in most regions of the world, most
prominently among indigenous peoples, but with some important manifestations in late 20th
century and contemporary western art. Naturally, there is often a hint of pseudoscience and
mysticism in the air as soon as shamanism is mentioned, and some of the popular literature
like the works of Carlos Castaneda embraces a broad usage of the term, drawing on
anthropology, comparative religion, linguistics, art history and aspects of popular culture.
Today, in a broad sense shamanism can be described as a set of practices concerned with
metaphysical or psychic processes.
True poetry, for Ted Hughes, was always a shamanic activity, and the shamanic flight
to the spirit world for the healing energies needed in our own world was, for him, "the
fundamental poetic event."6 In folktales and myths, he had found the basic experience of the
poetic temperament to be of the heroic quest which had shown its superior examples in Eliot,
Yeats and Graves, but he had to refashion them to serve his own purpose. And not until he
had studied archeology and anthropology was Hughes able to identify its variations in
shamanism all over the world. For him, the shaman is the man who has a vision, undergoes a
magical death, is dismembered by a demon and is resurrected with new ideas and a new body
created for him by the spirits. In his flight and return he displays healing powers and provides
clairvoyant information bringing up to our ordinary mind the revelations of our deepest
instinct and spiritual insights. Like the shaman, for Hughes, the poet undergoes with
phenomenal intensity the flight and return that will produce the practical result of the
regeneration of spirit.
Hughes initially got his concept of shamanism from reading Mircea Eliade's book
Shamanism, which he reviewed in 1964, as well as from the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
Bardol Thodol, which is a record of such a psychic journey. Hughes writes in his review: “the
shamanic flight is one of the main regeneration dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental
poetic event,"7 and it is the regenerative power of the shaman/poet's flight which was of
6
Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe, pp. 206-7
In the 29th issue of The Listener (1964), Hughes reviews Mircea Eliade's Shamanism , now
reprinted in Winter Pollen (Hughes 1994, 58).
7
163
utmost importance to him, being the means by which he has consistently sought to counter
the divisions and the sterility which he sees in our world and to restore it to wholeness. “The
results, when the shaman returns to the living, are some display of healing power, or a
clairvoyant piece of information. The cathartic effect on the audience, and the refreshing of
their religious feeling, must be profound” (Scigaj, 91). Hughes had repeatedly stated that
many of his poems are deliberate shamanic flights of fancy into the spirit world, excursions to
the “other side” where he might properly inhabit the nature of his subject, be it animal,
vegetable or mineral and the role he plays as poet must be understood literally in terms of the
activity of the shaman.
Further, he uses the same term to describe Plath's poetic activity:
Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way that clairvoyance and
mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to
make her frequently wish to be rid of them. In her poetry, in other words, she
had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive
ecstatic priests, shamans and holy men, and more recently flung open to
tourists with the passport of such hallucinogens as LSD.8
In an essay entitled 'Sylvia Plath and Her Journals'9, originally published as an
introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes argues that all of Plath's writing
was, in a strict sense mythical as well as autobiographical.
The root system of her talent was a deep and inclusive inner crisis which
seems to have been quite distinctly formulated in its chief symbols
(presumably going back at least as far as the death of her father, when she was
eight) by the time of her first attempted suicide, in 1953, when she was
twenty-one. After 1953, it became a much more serious business, a
continuous, hermetically sealed process that changed only very slowly, so that
for years it looked like deadlock. Though its preoccupation dominated her life,
it remained largely outside her ordinary consciousness, but in her poems we
8
Ted Hughes, "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems, Tri Quarterly, 7 (Fall 1966), 82.
When this essay was reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath, the sentence about shamans and LSD was omitted.
9
Ted Hughes, 'Sylvia Plath and her Journals', in Paul Alexander (ed.), Ariel Ascending: Writings about Sylvia
Plath (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
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164
see the inner working of it. It seems to have been scarcely disturbed at all by
the outer upheavals she passed through, by her energetic involvement in her
studies, in her love affairs and her marriage, though she used details from
them as a matter of course for images to develop her X rays. (Hughes, 185)
For Hughes, Plath's life and writing formed a single, archetypal drama of psychic
rebirth, rooted in 'a deep and inclusive inner crisis' and Plath's initial task, like that of any
shaman was to heal this crisis, a " bee-line instinct." As Hughes saw it, her poetry, up until
the birth of Ariel, records a "strange limbo of 'gestation / regeneration' which followed her
'death' i.e. her first suicide attempt. Ted writes that Sylvia's poetry up until the birth of "the
poetic spirit Ariel" was something akin to shamanic initiation. It was "the biology of Ariel,
the ontology of Ariel"10 "a process of self-salvation" and "a resurrection of Sylvia's deepest
spiritual vitality" which Sylvia interpreted as her own "drama" of death, gestation and rebirth.
Elsewhere too, Hughes had often commented on how her early, painstakingly systematic
poetic process differed from the furious storm of creativity during the months prior to her
suicide that resulted in the Ariel poems.11 In the same essay, he writes of a 'deeply secluded
mythic and symbolic inner theater accessible to her only in her poetry' (Hughes, 155). The
drama played out in this 'theater' is one defined by its exclusions: 'One would like to
emphasize even more strongly the weird autonomy of what was going on in there' (Hughes,
155). There is an insistence on a 'hermetic', quasi-biological, or even neurological content of
consciousness governed by a mysterious fatality. And indeed, Written on her birthday,
“Ariel” continues the theme of the re-identification and rebirth of the narrator. She writes of
becoming one with her galloping horse, Ariel, whose name alludes to the imprisoned
Shakespearean sprite and the doomed city of Jerusalem, which also reflects her Jewish roots.
The poem can divide into two halves. The first portion, stanzas one through nine, slant
towards a sensual, sexual, libertine existence, while in the last seven stanzas the narrator is
reborn as “a pure acetylene” (Plath, A. 63).
10
Hughes refers to the “Ariel” voice to as ‘the real thing’.
During her first mental breakdown and famous disappearance, Sylvia was subsequently hospitalized and
treated with shock therapy. Plath described the hospitalization as "[a] time of darkness, despair, and disillusion-so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be--symbolic death, and numb shock--then the painful agony
of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration." This was followed by a suicide attempt in 1953 and six months of
intensive therapy.
11
165
12
The "religious man," Eliade writes, "is projected into a vital plane that shows him the
fundamental data of human existence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surrounding
world.”
Dr.Ann Skea notes:13
“Sylvia, in her journal entries for July 6, 14 and 19, 1953, in The Bell Jar
and in her story 'Tongues of Stone' (267-74), describes her own crisis at the age of
20 in just such terms: she writes of her acute horror at the electrocution of the
Rosenbergs, her increasing alienation from and isolation from the surrounding
world, and of her own knowledge that something was wrong with her. It was this
distress, isolation and knowledge which led her to attempt suicide in 1953. And it
was this unsuccessful suicide attempt which she later regarded as the 'death' which
would bring about the birth of her new creative self. 'The Tender Place', however,
begins not with Sylvia's suicide attempt, but with the electric shock treatment which
followed it. It is a terrible and frightening version of events which Sylvia herself
described in The Bell Jar (p.117 - 174), in 'Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams'
(33) and in her poems 'The Hanging Man' (141-2) and 'Poem for a Birthday' (136-7).
Every one of these descriptions finds echoes in the act of self-wounding and
subsequent dismemberment which begins shamanic initiation. And often the spirit
which calls the shaman to his or her vocation is, according to Eliade, an ancestor
"who takes possession of the initiate" (Eliade, Shamanism, pp.22, 82).”
12
Taken from the photo archive of the artist Sabrina King on Flickr. Seehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/abaigeal/761408924/
13
"Poetry and Magic - The Hierophant." Pacific Internet Australia. 1 June 2008
http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Hieroph.htm.
Plath Profiles
166
Often the spirit that calls the shaman to his or her vocation is, according to Eliade, an
ancestor "who takes possession of the initiate." In her poem “Daddy” Sylvia describes her
suicide attempt as an effort to get back to her father.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two
I was ten when they buried you
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do. (Plath, Poems, p-31)
In Plath’s corpus, the idea that the dead father or some ruined figure withheld
knowledge or the magic that would release poetry is persistent and every period of creative
sterility in her life would produce a poem/poems evoking this dead/ruined but always absent
figure.14 During 1961-62, Plath made her creative block the subject of her poems when this
figure took attributes of Plath’s own father (his physical as well as German ancestry) as well
as those her husband and what unfolds slowly is a mythic drama in which the father-husband
–male figure is a particular demon to be confronted with. At the time of her father's death,
Sylvia saw him as a god. Not ready to be without a father, Plath was unable to let go of his
memory. In order to get back to him, she felt as though she had to resurrect him and then kill
him a second time. Identification, both with the father, as well as with Hughes and the
ambiguity of her feelings for both men is succinctly expressed through powerful images of
violence in “Daddy”, a poem written during this period. Plath recreates an image of villagers
dancing and stomping on the dead vampire, drawing upon Germanic myth.
Thor’s voice its very self
14
See also “Little Fugue”.
167
Doing a hammer-dance on Daddy’s body,
Avenging the twenty-year forsaken
Sobs of Germania … (Plath, Poems, 31)
Dr. Ann Skea suggests,15 “it is the Father God's "thunderbolt" which crashes into Sylvia's
skull in “The Tender Place” and his "lightnings" which terrify her. The oak limb is like "your
Daddy's leg." All these images find parallels in shamanic lore where, in the initiatory ordeal
that follows the shamanic 'death', the shaman is dismembered, reduced by demons and then
re-born from bones. Thor, the Father regularly uses his magic hammer, Mjolnir, to re-animate
bones. And Thor's tree, the Oak, which is sacred in many European and Scandinavian
cultures, is like the Cosmic Tree from which the shamanic drum is made. It is the shaman's
own songs and poems that made to the music and rhythm of this drum creates the ecstasy that
allows the shaman to fly to the “Otherworld” for healing energies … Plath’s writing her own
imaginative account of her shamanic journey in “Poem for a Birthday” makes the electric
shock treatment, “volt upon volt,” (Plath, “The Stones”) part of the reconstruction of herself,
rather than a dismemberment. And her rebirth is complete, whereas, Ted, in “The Tender
Place” however, sees the treatment as wholly destructive:
What went up
Vaporized? Where the lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve threw off its skin
Like a new-born child (Hughes, “The Tender Place”, Birthday Letters)
Sylvia, in this imagery, is left as a conductor of raw energy, dangerously unprotected and
with "scorched-earth scars" which were still apparent years later. In this poem, Sylvia's
initiation, her poetic journey, is just beginning. Yet, in spite of her vulnerability, she seemed
driven to continue. In 'Sylvia Plath and her Journals', Ted describes the process as having a
"weird autonomy", as if her poetry was "a secret crucible, or rather a womb, an almost
biological process - and just as much beyond her manipulative interference. And like a
pregnancy selfish with her resources"
15
"Poetry and Magic - The Hierophant." Pacific Internet Australia. 1 June 2008,
http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Hieroph.htm.
Plath Profiles
168
The concept of Pan is a question worth looking at this position.16 Pan, was a word which had
special meaning for Ted and Sylvia in another context, for Pan was the name of the Ouija
spirit they had summoned to find poetic subjects. Perhaps an example of what Hughes
regarded as “thinking”, it had produced a suggestion that Plath writes a poem about Lorelei.
Plath writes in Letters Home - “This has never occurred to me consciously as a subject, and it
seemed a good one. The Germanic legend background, the water-images, the death-wish and
so on. So, the next day, I begun a poem about them and Pan … it is one of my favorites” (p346). It is significant to note that Pan is the magician, the trickster, but also a son of the sky
god and associated especially with the orphic mysteries of shamanic death and rebirth,
connected to fertility and season of spring.
A significant departure also is “The Bee Meeting” which seems to suggest a strange
initiation into which Sylvia is brought into, to cover her fear and her sense of loneliness: "I
am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me? Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her
white shop smock..." The imagery of this initiation points to surgery, as if she is being
transformed somehow, her old self placed in the "long white box in the grove". Chapter
Seven of Rudolf Steiner's fourth mystery drama, The Soul's Awakening,17 describes the
process of Plath attending a cultic rite as a neophyte luminously. God's golden child, the ego
of Sylvia Plath, must be united with the spiritual power of the bee hive. In her journals, Plath
describes the externals of this event, the vivid remembrances that her conscious mind had
perceived. Three days before writing "The Bee Meeting," Plath composed the famous "A
Birthday Present" (providing the psychological "bridge" between "Poem for a Birthday" and
the "Bees" sequence). In it, Plath reveals that she, like the Virgin Mary, is slated for an
"annunciation" -- a mystical insemination -- and that the unwrapped, mysterious "birthday
present" is, ideally, her own death. The poem, on the other hand, is a record of the psychic
realities of the meeting and encompasses subconscious awareness in addition to her conscious
memories. Plath was "chosen" and prepared for this event. Her father, was the "Maestro of
Bees" and under his foot, she could feel the weight and gravity of the Earth and feel akin to
the mineral kingdom. Her father helped her to incarnate, to be part of the world and to act in
the world. After the initiation, she would become the airy spirit, Ariel, whose spiritual flight
would mimic the Queen Bee, the most solar of creatures whose gestation period occurs
wholly within the time of one solar revolution. One of the most fertile creatures on Earth, the
16
17
See also “The Pan,” a poem Hughes wrote for the collection Birthday Letters.
Rudolf Steiner, Four Mystery Dramas. Rudolf Steiner Press.Translated by Ruth and Hans Pusch.
169
Queen Bee almost literally mates with the Sun, and the drones must follow her on her
dizzying trip and the successful drone must die as his body disintegrates during this solar
flight. After the trip to the Sun, the Queen returns to the hive to lay tens of thousands of eggs,
enough to supply the hive for an entire season. Likewise, after careful preparation, the
Egyptian neophyte is lifted out of his physical body in a near death experience. He wears
what Steiner refers to as the “etheric body.” His greatest materiality is now in the bodily
processes, a nonmaterial body that exists in the world of pure ideas. Here we experience ideas
as "buzzing" entities as our inner life becomes a swarming horde of bees that surrounds us.
The villagers make Plath "one of them" by altering her "garments." Her physical and formgiving "bodies" are prepared and taken to the buzzing hives of the etheric world, the world
where time processes are dense materiality. The smoke of the spirit penetrates the virgin
etheric hive and the "I" or ego of Plath must experience the buzzing ideas directly. Thought
flies like "hysterical elastics" and the "I" attempts to remain hidden and not to interact with
these entities. The initiators effect the merger of Plath's ego with the old Queen bee but the
spiritual flight is somehow interrupted and Plath's exhausted ego must ponder her
transformation and her body's lack of heat. Finally she foresees that this initiation will require
her actual physical death and that she must permanently take leave of her present incarnation.
And yet for Sylvia this initiation eventually represents her queenly resumption of power, her
renewal of flesh and spirit after the "Wintering", with her old self placed in the "long white
box in the grove."
I am exhausted, I am exhausted Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished,
why am I cold. (Plath, "The Bee Meeting".)
Plath Profiles
170
18
The error of thy sense of self be burned
in fire, enkindled in this rite for thee.
Burn thou thyself with substance of thine error.
(Plath,"The Bee Meeting")
Hughes gives Plath’s transformation a mythic shape in his Birthday Letters, which
adds to his idealized autobiography, an account of Sylvia Plath as the instigator of his journey
to the land of the dead, from which he emerged as a shaman. His poem published in Birthday
Letters entitled “Visit”, offers a dramatic version of the way that journey began and describes
the return of Plath from the grave into his living consciousness as a creative force.
Ten years after your death
18
Sylvia Plath's grave, Heptonstall taken by the artist Felix Macpherson on February 21, 2007. See
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leafhouse/398988871/.
171
I meet on a page of your journal, as never before…
Your actual words, as they floated
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page…
I look up – as if to meet your voice
With all its urgent future
That has burst in on me … (Hughes, “Visit” in Birthday Letters)
In “Poetry Matters”19, Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick writes“In Poetic Licence20, Helen Carr argues that poetry's identification with feeling and
subjectivity is valuable in cultures that fear emotion and value the apparently
objective and transparent discourses of science and theory. A feminist embrace of
the ‘degraded’ realm of feeling allows Carr to employ Native American oral poetry
as an example of performed ritual that produces healing and to draw parallels with
the practice of contemporary poetry. For Carr, poets enact transformations in their
poems to produce them for their audience through "finding a way by which
contradictions and confusions can be set down by finding words that draw the
inchoate into signification" (Carr, 91); and the poet, like the shaman, uses her
creativity to speak for more than herself/himself, producing cultural artifacts that are
"both pleasurable and empowering" (Carr, 95).”
The early shamans went on their own pilgrimages, discovering through their visions a cosmic
order containing love and joy, and then returned to their own communities to restore the
society's shattered rites so that this vision could be ritualistically presented to everyone in the
community. The shaman, Eliade tells us, recalls a lost paradise and presents visions of that
paradise in terms of epiphanies of love and cosmic order and joy. Plath might not be
shamanic in the same way as those early shamans that Eliade describes in his many works
and yet, she serves many a shamanic functions, chief among them writing a poetry that can be
healing, or even redemptive .Her personal, traumatic experiences, are recognized, grieved
over and healed. Transformed into poetry they serve as the medium both within the realm of
19
NWSA Journal , Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2002
Carr, Helen. 'Poetic Licence' in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern
World.
20
Plath Profiles
the individual poet as well as her community of readers and become medium for survival
both within individuals and across generations.
.
“Traumatic memories are encoded not narratively but in images and feelings, both
emotional and physical. Thus, the traumatic experience cannot be directly referred to
but must be remembered, reconstructed, and worked through indirectly in an address
with another. This is why poetry allows us to witness as survivors to having
survived and to witness others' survival: poetry, like trauma, takes images, feelings,
rhythms, sounds, and the physical sensations of the body as evidence. (Carr, 3).”
172
173
Works Cited
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Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath: Second Edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness: A Biography. Toronto: Schaffner
Press, 2004.
Carr, Helen. 'Poetic Licence' in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the
Postmodern World. London and New York: Pandora Pr, 1990.
Contemporary Women's Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2000.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Bollingen Series (General)).
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Faas, Ekbert. Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe.. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow
Press, 1980
Haberkamp, Frederike. Sylvia Plath: Poetics of Beekeeping (Salzburg Studies in English
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Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. New York City: Faber Faber, 2002.
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2002, pp. 185-195
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