"The Boot in the Face": The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
1996; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208714
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Poetry
Resumowhole oeuvre is frequently and superficially viewed as somehow tainted by the perceived egoism of her deployment of the Holocaust in these poems. Such straightforward condemnation, however, disguises the difficulties surrounding any judgment of Plath's treatment of this material-difficulties which are clearly exhibited by the respected critic George Steiner, who in 1965 applauded Daddy as The 'Guernica' of modern poetry (Dying 330), yet later, in 1969, declared that the extreme nature of Plath's late poems left him uneasy: Does any writer, does any human being other than an actual survivor, have the right to put on this death-rig? (In Extremis 305). It is important to study both why and how the Holocaust appears in Plath's poetry, because our reaction to it as readers and the strategies Plath uses to approach it are tied to a wider problem relating to the place of the Holocaust in our culture. If we understand this, it is possible to place the disturbing appearance of the Holocaust in Plath's poems in its proper context, and to see this effect as symptomatic of a more general problem she recognizes, a conflict about
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