No More Idols But Me

Considering the final poems of Sylvia Plath in the context of György Lukács’ essay “The Ideology of Modernism”

Plath with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, in 1959

After furiously writing sometimes two poems a day during October and November 1962, and arranging her second collection, Ariel, as she wished it to be preserved, Sylvia Plath did not complete another poem until January 28, 1963. During the interim she packed up the house she had shared in Devon with her poet husband, Ted Hughes, and moved herself and her two children into a flat in London that had been owned by one of her most beloved poets of the Modern period, W. B. Yeats. It was in this home, where she thought to find a new beginning, that she would die.

As she herself recognized though, the last eleven poems she completed over the nine days following January 28, beginning with “Sheep in Fog”, represent a remarkably unified suite. Taken together, as such, they are remarkably consistent with Hungarian philosopher and literary critic György Lukács’ description of Modernism and the inevitable consequences of Modernism’s theoretical approach, such as the attenuation of reality and the dissolution of personality. Where there might be parental love there is a pained awareness of disappointed expectations (as in the poem “Edge”, in which the speakers folds her children “back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden // Stiffens and the odors bleed”); where there might be human presence there is loneliness and cognitive dissonance (“Munich Mannequins”: “the snow drops its pieces of darkness, // Nobody’s about”, or “Gigolo”, where “the streets are lizardy crevices”); where there might be transcendence there is bathos (“Paralytic”: “my God the iron lung // that loves me, pumps / my two / dust bags in and out”, and “Mystic”: “used, used utterly…Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?”). By considering Plath’s final works in the context of Lukács’ essay “The Ideology of Modernism”, we can see how these poems document the loss of potentiality, the failure of the bourgeois domestic ideal, and the insufficiencies of modern subjectivism that are inherent in the ideology of Modernism.

“The Disquieting Muses” by Giorgio de Chirico, one of the artists Plath was most inspired by. His paintings often depict a modern world haunted by the classical one, and empty of the human. Plath wrote an ekphrastic on this painting, but it is intriguing to compare many of Plath’s poems to De Chirico’s works.