Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar'

A review by Abigail Cannon

(Warning: Spoilers,  discussion of mental health and suicide. If you decide to read this book, please research the trigger warnings and make an informed choice. )

This deeply touching and thought provoking book follows protagonist Esther Greenwood’s struggle with her mental health as a young woman in 1960s America. We encounter her friends, family, romantic acquaintances, magazine internship in New York and time spent in mental health facilities all through her excruciating and emotive mind and voice. Although she appears to be in a psychotic state of depression, you can’t help but relate to Esther Greenwood’s frank internal monologue. She says life as it is; messy, boring, disappointing, joyful, confusing, valuable; an ode to real life, to pain, and to pleasure. If you’re into music, this novel made me think of the song ‘Child Psychology’ by Black Box Recorder, harbouring the same candid  dialogue and melancholy tone. 

I wanted to end this review with a quote (or two). Now, as a writer you always want to say something unique to you, find your niche, find a quote you like that isn’t the expected one. My quotes of choice may not be original, but I can’t imagine choosing another to share with you. As her psychosis and depression exacerbates, Esther tries to swim out to sea and drown herself; “I thought I would swim out until I was too tired to swim back. As I paddled on, my heartbeat boomed like a dull motor in my ears. I am I am I am.” Esther is ready to give up, let the waves swallow her and float to the sea bed; she is tired of living. As the novel ends, Plath returns to the same structure, but a new perspective, formulating one of the novel’s most popular string of words. While Plath leaves us an ambiguous ending and we don’t know what happens to Esther, the future seems positive and it is possible to imagine Esther accepting the value of being alive. At her friend's funeral, she is reminded of the precious life she owns by her own body;  “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

What is the point of poetry?

By Megan Russill

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.”

— Mr Keating, The Dead Poets Society (1989)

Now neck-deep in my year 12 English literature studies, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and their poetry permeate vast swathes of my life. However, the hyper-scrutiny of these poems in English classes often makes me forget that what I’m reading is a small part of someone’s soul, that what I’m looking at contains some wild, beating essence within its words. The reduction of these poems to merely tools to pass our exams can suck the life out of them. As American Poet Natalie Colburn says, “It’s as if the class were in the presence of a wonderful falcon and, instead of watching it fly, instead pinned it down, cut it open, dissected, and killed the bird”. I think the description of poetry as dynamic is an accurate one. Sometimes when I’m sitting at my desk in the late hours of the evening, staring blankly at the mass of words on the page before me, suddenly the poem will leap into my brain, and I’ll be faced with the question: ‘why does it exist?’.

During my research for this article, when I was blindly googling ‘why do we write poetry?’, the answers kept being surface level. I was reading that it improved vocabulary and sentence structure for authors, that it was a good way to become known as a writer. However, I knew I was looking for a deeper answer, something more human. I decided it was sensible to establish a definition of poetry.

In 1975, American boxer and activist Muhammad Ali was invited to talk to a group of Havard students. Whilst he was on stage, someone from the crowd yelled ‘Give us a poem, Muhammad!’. He hesitated for a moment, then looked up and said ‘Me. We’. This couplet is known as the shortest poem ever written in English. It reflects on the transition of the singular to the plural and the strength unification has over standing alone. Naturally, there was debate within the writing community over whether this was an actual poem. But in the end all discourse had focused into a single, glimmering point; a new definition of poetry as simply a medium for sharing individual experiences to many. All poems are a shout into the void. A poem is something with a blazing core at its centre, desperate to be known. I believe this is a fitting definition of poetry. A circumstance which portrays this exactly is that in 1586, Englishman Chidicock Tichborne was imprisoned in the tower of London for plotting to kill the queen. The night before his execution, he composed in a letter to his wife, a grand poem concerning his impending death. This was titled ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’. The final lines of it state:

‘I sought my death and found it in my womb,

I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,

I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb’

These words sing with an ominous reminder of mortality. They were Tichborne’s last plea to existence and depict his final act of desperation to leave a mark on the world.

But the question persists: why? Why did Tichborne choose to write his final words as a poem rather than clear sentences, presenting what he wanted to say without the ambiguity and the double meanings? Some think the answer lies in the fact that greater levels of meaning are available through poetry that cannot be reached in standard prose. It is not just the words of a poem but a combination of poetic structure, punctuation, lexical fields and symbolism which swirl together to form a deep and nuanced meaning. Through poetry, one can convey an exact feeling. Often, one writes because they feel something ricocheting off the walls of their interior; the urge to write is a calling to release whatever is inside of you. It’s why people write diaries, why Sylvia Plath’s most creative time was also her most mentally disturbed; she had ideas inside of her that were begging for a life of their own before she took hers, and theirs with it. Poetry can release feelings in their most accurate form. Poetry is soul stuff on paper. And that is poetry’s fundament, that it is distinguished by the human soul. In 2016, Dartmouth researchers created a turing test of sorts; they gathered numerous robotic poetry generators (which were more advanced than modern Chat GPT at writing poetry) and assembled a table of judges. When asked blindly if the poems were written by humans or robots, the judges were correct 100% of the time. The differences were not blatant either, the human ones just had some indefinable substance that revealed themselves as man-made. You can read the poems yourself by clicking this link.

Poetry is a release of humanity. Now you’ve experienced this discussion of why we write poetry, you may be motivated to write some yourself. Poetry will improve your sentence structure, your vocabulary and will make you view the world with a new level of wonder. However, poetry can also be for cathartic purposes. This means any time you find yourself grappling with emotions that feel too large for your body, it may help to pick up a pen, relax and write. As Mr Keating put it in the Dead Poets Society (1989), we write poetry because ‘the human race is filled with passion’. Since release is the basis of poetry, you should not shy away from it because it can really be anything. We have progressed far from the rigid structures of sonnets and limericks, with almost all modern poetry being in free verse. I wrote this article to release something I’ve been questioning recently, and I’ve used unique language choices at times in order to best articulate my beliefs. Therefore, some could argue a more fitting title of this article could be ‘The Point Of Poetry; A Poem’.