Sylvia Plath's transformations of modernist paintings

Introduction

Sylvia Plath's letters and journals document her knowledge of and interest in painting - especially modernist paintings. In the letters and journals she mentions De Chirico, Gauguin, Goya, Gris, Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, van Gogh and others.

Prior to 1956, Plath was already incorporating references to art works in her poetry. In "Midsummer Mobile"-a rather shallow poem of instructions to a would-be painter, she refers to "a sky of Dufy blue," to "Seurat: fleck[ed] schooner," "the mellow palette of Matisse," and "a rare Calder mobile" (Hughes 1981, 324). Furthermore, not only does the title of her "To Eva Descending the Stair" echo that of Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," but so does the poem's theme: that stasis is impossible and that "stillness is a lie," because "The wheels revolve" and "the universe keeps moving" (303).

Her first mature poems about paintings were motivated, as so frequently was the case with Plath, by the possibility of publication and payment for publication.1 In January, 1958, Art News wrote her offering her "from $50 to $75 for a poem on a work of art" (Plath 1975, 336). On the day she received the letter, she immediately thought of Gauguin. On January 26, referring to "the red-caped medicine man, the naked girl lying with the strange fox, [and] Jacob wrestling with his angel" she writes, "I shall sit and stare at Gauguin in the library, limit my field and try to rest, then write it." Two weeks later she writes," I'm hoping to go to the Art Museum and meditate on Gauguin and Rousseau" (1975, 336). On March 5, she writes that she plans "to have my art poems-one to three (Gauguin, Klee and Rousseau)-completed by the end of March," and exclaims, "I feel my mind, my imagination, nudging, sprouting, prying and peering" (Hughes 1982, 202). By March 20, 1958, she has "narrowed down poem subjects to Klee (five paintings and etchings) and Rousseau (two paintings)" (208).2 Two days later, after getting "piles of wonderful books from the Art Library," she feels she is "overflowing with ideas and inspirations, as if I've been bottling up a geyser for a year" (Plath 1975, 336), and she writes to her mother, "These [`Virgin,"Perseus,"Battle-Scene,' and `Departure of the Ghost'] are easily the best poems I've written and open up new material and a new voice. I've discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art" (336). Then on March 28, she records in her journal, "I wrote eight poems in the last eight days, long poems, lyrical poems, and thunderous poems: poems breaking open my real experience of life in the last five years: life which has been shut up, untouchable ... not to be touched. I feel these are the best poems I have ever done" (Hughes 1982, 210). She says that she speaks with "a broad wide voice (that] thunders and sings of joy, sorrow and the deep visions of queer and terrible and exotic worlds" (211).

Plath has utilized specific paintings as sources for over a dozen poems. In some she acknowledges the painting that inspired it. In others she provides enough details to identify the work but does not name it.

She usually transforms paintings into poems in one of three ways. Sometimes she simply describes the picture, merely replicating the picture in words; sometimes she brings a merely visual, two-dimensional picture to life by giving it plot, emotional resonance, and theme; or, finally, she completely transforms the painting into a poem whose subject and theme differ considerably from the painting which inspired it. In such transformations she may utilize only a few details of the picture and, sometimes, little more its title.3 When she does this, she usually aims to emphasize the limited roles she felt existed for women of her generation, to complain about how her mother and father have ruined her life, or to express her own anxieties.

Replications

In "The Seafarer" and "Yadwigha," two of Plath's poems based on modernist paintings, she does little more than replicate the painting in words.

"Battle Scene"

In "Battle-Scene," based on Paul Klee's `The Seafarer"' (1923, Frau Trix Durst-Hass Collection, Muttenz/Basel), Plath adds a bit of narrative, which could be deduced from the painting, and refers to how sea dragons are imagined by children. She describes its "surface of gently- / Graded turquoise tiles," "the seafarer / . . . In his pink plume and armor," the "lantern-frail Gondolo of paper," and

the fishpond Sinbad

Who poises his pastel spear

Toward three pinky-purple

Monsters which uprear

Off the ocean floor. (Hughes 1981, 84)

She suggests that the sea may hold dangers ("The whale, the shark, the squid"), mentions Ahab, suggests that children imagine scary adventures as they sing "Their bathtub battles deep, / Hazardous and long," but admits that adults, know that in reality the dragon is nothing more than a "sofa, [with] / Fang for pasteboard" (Hughes 1981, 84).

Like the painting, which is static and innocuous (if charming),4 Plath's poem has no plot and no emotional resonance. If anything, she further trivializes the painting's drama by describing the seafarer's "Odyssey" with diction like "little," "gently" "pink and lavender," depicting the sea as a "fishpond" which "Bear[s] up the seafarer, / Gaily, gaily" (echoeing the "merrily, merrily" of"Row, Row, Row Your Boat"), and picturing the seamonsters as "pinky-purple."