In “Morn­ing Song,” from Sylvia Plath’s posthu­mous 1965 col­lec­tion Ariel, pub­lished two years after her sui­cide, a new­born infant is a “fat gold watch.” Among the inces­sant lists of adjec­tives in both her work, “fat” is one that stands out, appear­ing often, in sev­er­al syn­onyms, as a cel­e­bra­tion of abun­dance and real anx­i­ety over weight gain and a gen­er­al too-much­ness. In the same poem, the baby is a work of art, a “new stat­ue.” Its moth­er, on the oth­er hand, is in one stan­za a cloud effaced by the wind in a mir­ror, and a clum­sy ani­mal, “cow-heavy and flo­ral / In my Vic­to­ri­an night­gown. / Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.”

Plath’s images are brac­ing and unex­pect­ed, awed and strick­en, usu­al­ly at once. She deploys them so quick­ly and adroit­ly that even when one fails to land, the oth­ers imme­di­ate­ly take up the slack, mak­ing even her less-great poems impres­sive for a line or stan­za that takes hold in the mind for days. This abil­i­ty was not the result of either divine inspi­ra­tion or men­tal ill­ness, but tal­ent honed through hard work and com­mit­ment. Plath “chose the artist’s way. Poet­ry was her call­ing,” the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video by Iseult Gille­spie tells us above. As such, she per­se­vered even through severe bouts with depres­sion and many sui­cide attempts before she final­ly suc­cumbed at age 30.

Plath’s semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, The Bell Jar, which dra­ma­tizes these themes, as well as a hand­ful of her dark­est poems, have come to pop­u­lar­ly sym­bol­ize her lega­cy. You’ve heard of them even if you’ve nev­er read them. Yet she com­posed a “large bulk of poet­ry,” her hus­band, poet Ted Hugh­es, wrote in the intro­duc­tion to her Col­lect­ed Works, pub­lished and unpub­lished, nev­er throw­ing any­thing out. “She brought every piece she worked on to some final form accept­able to her, reject­ing at most the odd verse…. Her atti­tude to her verse was arti­san-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the mate­r­i­al, she was quite hap­py to get a chair, or even a toy.”

His char­ac­ter­i­za­tion may not sound like the most char­i­ta­ble, and as her lit­er­ary execu­tor, Hugh­es was accused of refus­ing to pub­lish some of her work. But he was also a fel­low poet who watched her tire­less­ly write and revise. Quot­ing from her jour­nals, Hugh­es shows how her first col­lec­tion, 1960’s The Colos­sus and Oth­er Poems, came togeth­er over a peri­od of many years, its title chang­ing every few months, new poems appear­ing and old ones falling away. The result is a debut whose “breath­tak­ing per­spec­tives on emo­tion, nature, and art con­tin­ue to cap­ti­vate and res­onate,” notes the video’s nar­ra­tor.

Despite her major pres­ence in the lit­er­ary mag­a­zines and the respect she won espe­cial­ly in the UK, The Colos­sus and Oth­er Poems would be Plath’s only pub­lished col­lec­tion in her life­time. It made her a well-respect­ed poet, but did not make her the celebri­ty she became after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Bell Jar three years lat­er and her sui­cide the fol­low­ing month. “With­in a week of her death,” writes Time mag­a­zine in its review of Ariel in 1966, “intel­lec­tu­al Lon­don was hunched over copies of a strange and ter­ri­ble poem she had writ­ten dur­ing her last sick slide toward sui­cide. ‘Dad­dy’ was its title.”

After the pub­li­ca­tion of Ariel, read­ers fixed on “Dad­dy” and “Lady Lazarus,” sen­sa­tion­al poems in which “fear, hate, love, death and the poet’s own iden­ti­ty become fused at bleak heat with the fig­ure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the Ger­man exter­mi­na­tors and the suf­fer­ing of their Jew­ish vic­tims.” These are poems, wrote Robert Low­ell in his pref­ace, that “play Russ­ian roulette with six car­tridges in the cylin­der.” As fem­i­nist schol­ars embraced her work in the 1970s, a mor­bid fas­ci­na­tion with her image only grew. This is the Plath many peo­ple know by word of mouth. But those who haven’t read more of her will miss out.

Plath doesn’t shy away from star­ing at sui­cide, abuse, and mass mur­der. She helped to “break the silence sur­round­ing issues of trau­ma, frus­tra­tion, and sex­u­al­i­ty.” Ariel and her dozens of uncol­lect­ed poems are also “filled with mov­ing med­i­ta­tions on heart­break and cre­ativ­i­ty,” includ­ing the heart­break and cre­ativ­i­ty of moth­er­hood, a theme always fraught with fears of love and death. Plath’s work can be dark, and it can be at once lumi­nous in its imag­i­na­tive can­dor. In writ­ing about life with depres­sion and the domes­tic mis­ery vis­it­ed on her in her mar­riage to Hugh­es, she cel­e­brates life’s sub­lime plea­sures and mourns its depths of suf­fer­ing, in poem ofter poem, with near-con­stant inge­nu­ity, wit, and courage.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Sylvia Plath Read 50+ of Her Dark, Com­pelling Poems

Sylvia Plath, Ted Hugh­es & Peter Porter Read Their Poet­ry: Free Audio 

Sylvia Plath, Girl Detec­tive Offers a Hilar­i­ous­ly Cheery Take on the Poet’s Col­lege Years

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

It became fash­ion­able dur­ing the Euro­pean Renais­sance for poets to write what is called an ars poet­i­ca, a “med­i­ta­tion on poet­ry using the form and tech­niques of a poem.” The form fol­lows Horace’s 19th cen­tu­ry, B.C.E. Ars Poet­i­ca, in which the Roman writer rec­om­mends that poet­ry should both “instruct and delight.”

The­o­ries of poet­ry var­ied from one gen­er­a­tion to the next, but the ars poet­i­ca per­sist­ed through­out mod­ern lit­er­ary his­to­ry and into the mod­ernism of Archibald Macleish, Ezra Pound, and Mar­i­anne Moore, all of whom issued mag­is­te­r­i­al dic­ta about poet­ry that has stuck to it ever since.

“A poem should be motion­less in time / As the moon climbs,” writes Macleish in his “Ars Poet­i­ca,” famous­ly con­clud­ing, “A poem should not mean / But be.” In Moore’s “Poet­ry,” which she revised through­out her life, final­ly whit­tling it down to just three lines, she writes of “imag­i­nary gar­dens with real toads in them.”

Such cryp­tic images and ellip­ti­cal apho­risms enact ambi­gu­i­ty as they pre­scribe it, but they make per­fect­ly clear they are mak­ing crit­i­cal judg­ments about the art of poet­ry. Then we have Emi­ly Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” (1263), a poem that serves as her ars poet­i­ca, argues Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, in his video essay above, but pur­ports on its sur­face to be about truth, cap­i­tal “T.”

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Suc­cess in Cir­cuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb sur­prise
As Light­ning to the Chil­dren eased
With expla­na­tion kind
The Truth must daz­zle grad­u­al­ly
Or every man be blind —

Rarely is Dick­in­son so “direct,” says Puschak. “Known for ambi­gu­i­ty, odd manip­u­la­tions in meter and rhyme” and “images that seem mys­te­ri­ous and some­times out of place,” she wrote “poet­ry brim­ming with slant truth, poet­ry that’s seem­ing­ly laid out here, in per­fect meter and match­ing rhymes.” The poem’s mes­sage is restat­ed four times, from the the­sis in the first line to the sim­i­le of the final four. “The mean­ing could not be more clear,” says Puschak.

But no, of course it’s not. A poem is not a man­u­al or man­i­festo. Like those poems more explic­it­ly about poet­ry, this one enacts the ambi­gu­i­ty it pre­scribes. Are we, for exam­ple, to “tell all the truth” as in “the whole truth?” or as in “tell every­one the truth”? Does “suc­cess” lie “in cir­cuit” like a patient lies on a table? Or does it tell lies, like, well… like poet­ry? Does the word “cir­cuit” refer to an uncer­tain, cir­cuitous path? Or, as one crit­ic has sug­gest­ed, to “cir­cum­fer­ence” (a term Dick­in­son used to refer to one’s lifes­pan or prop­er sphere)?

The next cou­plet, whose ref­er­ence to “infirm Delight” may or may not take Horace to task, push­es us fur­ther out to sea when we begin to read it care­ful­ly. What is this truth that can be told, slant­ed, but also comes as a “sur­prise,” like lightning—terrible, sud­den, and blind­ing? Is this a poem about “Truth” or about poet­ry?

In the final, heav­i­ly trun­cat­ed, ver­sion of “Poet­ry,” Mar­i­anne Moore con­cedes, grumpi­ly, that “one dis­cov­ers in / it, after all, a place for the gen­uine.” As Dickinson’s poem demon­strates, try­ing to find a “place” in poet­ry for any sta­ble mean­ing may be impos­si­ble. Still she insists that truth should “daz­zle grad­u­al­ly,” an oxy­moron­ic phrase, says Puschak, but it’s as evoca­tive, if more abstract, as real toads in made-up gardens—both are para­dox­i­cal means of describ­ing what poet­ry does.

Dick­in­son real­ized that her poem “had to be the phi­los­o­phy… that feel­ing of the text being desta­bi­lized from with­in, oscil­lat­ing from mean­ing to the nega­tion of that mean­ing.” Truth is inex­press­ible, per­haps inac­ces­si­ble, and maybe even fatal. Yet it may strike us, nonethe­less, in the daz­zling ambi­gu­i­ties of poet­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Online Emi­ly Dick­in­son Archive Makes Thou­sands of the Poet’s Man­u­scripts Freely Avail­able

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Film of Emi­ly Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Start­ed Early–Took My Dog’

An 8‑Hour Marathon Read­ing of 500 Emi­ly Dick­in­son Poems

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness