Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86909 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-18
• Released on: 2007-10-15
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Synopsis
Eye Rhymes brings to light a side of Sylvia Plath that is scarcely known: her serious involvement in the visual arts from a very early age. She moved between art-making and writing constantly, integrating their elements with ease and pleasure. As a child she considered a poem she had written or transcribed to be complete only when illustrated by a picture. As a young teen she recorded 'technicolor' dreams that told complete stories. Her diaries, letters, and school notebooks are full of doodles and self-portraits - all revealing important truths about her. Until her junior year at Smith College, she considered her two favorite disciplines as offering equally promising choices. It was only at the age of 20 that she decided to leave fine art behind her as her chosen career, and opt for the written word. Eye Rhymes presents a magnificent range of Plath's art, most of it seen in print for the first time: childhood sketches, illustrated diaries, portraits, rich modernist and expressionist paintings, fashion images, photographs, and more.

The book offers a myriad of new insights into Plath's creative energy, revealing unexpected themes and ideas that first saw light in visual form, to be re-born later in her greatest poetry. Drawing on the large collections of Indiana University's Lilly Library and Smith College's Mortimer Rare Book Room, it presents an in-depth examination of Sylvia Plath's visual art and literary studies, and their uses in her writing career. Kathleen Connors's illuminating account of Plath as artist and writer opens a rich seam of ideas developed further by distinguished Plath scholars Sally Bayley, Christina Britzolakis, Susan Gubar, Langdon Hammer, Fan Jinghua, and Diane Middlebrook. The writers contextualize approximately sixty of Plath's works within her writing oeuvre, starting with juvenilia that reveal the extensive play between her two disciplines. The book gives special attention to Plath's unpublished teen diaries and book reports, which contain drawings and early textual experiments, created years before her famous 'I am I' diary notes of age seventeen, when critical examination of her writing usually begins.

The contributors offer new critical approaches to the artist's multidimensional oeuvre, including writing that appropriates sophisticated visual and colour effects years after painting and drawing became her hobby and writing her chosen profession. Essayists demonstrate Plath's visual art interests as they relate to her early identity as a writer in Cambridge, her teen artwork and writing on war, her mid-career 'art poems' on the works of Giorgio de Chirico, her representations of womanhood within mid-century commercial culture, and her visual aesthetics in poetry. Eye Rhymes offers exciting new material on the life and work of Sylvia Plath, designed for the general public as well as Plath specialists, on the 75th anniversary of her birth in 1932.

Customer Reviews

Reconecting Plath With Her Gift: Poetry As Conceptual Art...
Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley have edited a book of Sylvia Plath's Art Work: `Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of The Visual' OUP ISBN 978-0-19-923387-8. The Book is out now.

Significant, challenging, interesting, yet in some way you know you don't quite see her properly. Sylvia Plath has been written as a poet who died for her art, like a soldier fallen in battle or some limbless Venus, always perfectly and partially formed in our imagination. This book reconnects Plath with her gift, but what is fascinating, is the connection with how the drawing and painting informed a poetry that in itself, can now be seen as conceptual art.

Because she was unidentified as an artist means that much has been written blindly about the art of her poetry, the obsessive way she charted and detailed each domestic life event. That each poem was itself a conscious substitute, a smoothing over, a calming, of her inability to sufficiently defamiliarise yet familiarise the space she inhabited to produce deeper, satisfying work where she could find a sense of authority and autonomy.

Art is work.

Poetry was a substitution for art. She tried to make the poems more than poetry, playing with words and images, but you get the feeling that there was little space for the kind of acknowledgement of the importance of the work and the working space local to artists that we take for granted in most cities today, for example.

Today artists and writers still complain about the pressures on them to relocate to London, yet they really do have rich, portable, `localising' networks wherever they are, now, where they can have an identity as an artist yet be part of what's happening in their neighbourhood, without having to cross the world to collect experience and credibility. Not so in the fifties and sixties.


Plath tried on the guises of woman, playing out and confronting the limitations of being clever, funny, wise, beautiful, ugly, undesirable, but against a background of incomprehension. When you consider the whimsicality of french artist Sophie Calle, for example, who dramatises and theatricalises the mundane, the random, the obvious, it's clear that poetry can be conceptual art.

There just wasn't the space then. The kind of serious playfulness, the disinterested affection, of an artist like Calle, becomes the tragic metonymy, the sick nightmare of the Captive Wife in Plath. And it is a tragic misreading which underlines its truth as art.

The process described by her poetry was subtle and self destructive: in domesticating her drive to draw and paint she distorted and undermined a natural ability to find the new, renewal and pleasure through working with words and images ambidextrously. Her perception, like that of Alice, would be endlessly written and rewritten, stuck, documented without wider context, in the weird and wonderful world of poetic possibility.