How Sylvia Plath’s Profound Nature Poetry Elevated Her Work Above Tragedy and Despair

I can’t stop writing poems! … They come from the dictionary of forests, animals and land.

From a letter from Sylvia Plath to her mother, 1956

Sylvia Plath is commonly portrayed as a newborn poet with deep-rooted problems due to her well-documented struggles with depression and macabre images found in some of her poetry. So the idea that nature inspired her writing may be surprising.

This desperate Plath is far from the poet I came to know and admire – the poet who writes about the simple beauty of meadows and mushroom strength as well as the greatness wild areas.

Plath’s fascination with the natural world began in childhood, as she clearly states in her essay. Ocean 1212-Win which she details the importance of the sea to her poetic imagination. This interest in nature continued into adulthood, when she read the works of biologists such as Rachel Carson, about whom she writes in her letters.

Any other poet with her background is credited with at least a passing interest in the natural world. However, Plath’s untimely death by suicide has distorted many interpretations of her poetry. The well-rehearsed argument that Plath uses nature in her poetry only as a “a mirror to look deeper into yourselfhas appeared in critical works on her work from the 1960s to the 21st century.

It is this confined vision of Plath that has led to a failure to recognize the ecological significance of her poetry. As the 60th anniversary of Plath’s death approaches, it is time to embrace more nuanced interpretations of her work and to reimagine what her poetic legacy might look like.

Natural beauty on a grand scale

Plath loved the enormous landscapes of the National Parks, as well as smaller wilderness areas such as the Yorkshire Moors in England. In letters from 1956, she describes the “great, brilliant emerald lights” of the Yorkshire countryside, concluding that she had “never been so cheerful in my life” as among the “wild, purple moors.”

These fragments of her letters refer to the grave statement contained in the poem Wuthering Hills that “there is no life higher than the tops of the grass and the hearts of the sheep.”

She found similar beauty in the national parks of America and Canada, which she visited in the summer of 1959. In letters from this period, she notes that she had never seen “such a wonderful country anywhere in the world.” No doubt these experiences inspired the sublime depiction of “the dominance of rocks and forests” and “clouds that put men to shame” in the poem Two Campers in Cloud Country as well as the spectacular “burst of red” he describes in sunsets over Algonquin National Park in Canada.

Beauty in smaller places

But it’s not the grand poetic representations of the natural world that appeal to me most. Even the most ardent city enthusiasts can pause for a moment of awe before thousand-year-old mountains, but few of us can capture the seemingly prosaic aspects of the natural world with the lyrical grandeur evident in much of her work.

Plath journal entrieswritten at the Yaddo writers’ retreat in upstate Novel York in the fall of 1959, shows a sensitive interest in the minute details of the natural world that many consider mundane or insignificant. Coming across a clump of toadstools in the Yaddo gardens, he notices these “round battering rams” with their “orange-red tops” and “pale lemon stems.”

Her poem Mushrooms captures much of this detail through the “supple fists” of the mushrooms as they push away the “mulch” of the garden. “Nobody sees us,” the collective voice of the mushrooms in the poem, before stating:

We’ll be there in the morning
Inherit the earth.
We’re already at the door.

In this poem, Plath highlights the wonderful elements of the natural world that many of us overlook or ignore. It highlights the dangers, as an environmental historian argues William Cronon suggestsappreciating only the kind of grand, majestic landscapes that can be found in national parks. In this way, Plath concludes, we neglect the importance of nature in more familiar and ordinary places.

Although Plath may be best remembered for her melancholic despair, Sheep in the fog or the enraged, flame-haired women in poems like Mrs. Lazarusit is also essential to remember the ecological significance she had in her work.

Despite personal difficulties in her marriage and sinking mental health, Plath’s interest in nature continued to inspire much of her delayed poetry. Her 1962 poem Among the Narcissusfor example, he captures a touching but ordinary moment of kinship between an older man who loves the “little flocks” of flowers in his garden and the flowers themselves, who “look up” from the flower beds toward him, “like children.”

Like the tiny flock of lilac crocuses that I was surprised to discover among the cracked pavements of my own, much-neglected garden, Plath’s poetry continues to surprise me with its extraordinary capacity to see the unseen in nature. Such a deeply felt attunement to nature deserves to be recognized as part of the prosperous and multifaceted legacy of her work.