156
1 am Marilyn
J
Marilyn,
I am a heroine
of suicide and heroin.
J
0.
H N MAL C
0.
LM BR INN IN
For whom are my dahlias blossoming?
For whom are the telephones gossiping?
Whose suede in the wardrobe
is
squeaking,
unwearable?
It's unbearable.
A Russian friend of mine, Olga Lawrence, who checked this version over
for me with the original, found it wonderfully close both to the form
and the sense; and yet one wonders how often Mr. Marshall has had
a little
to distort sense to get this equivalent of rhyme and rhythm: rightly,
no doubt, for one would guess that this is a poet for whom rhyme and
rhythm, brilliant smooth surface, are, if not everything, at least very
much. Mr. Marshall deserves much credit for having, at least,
suggested
this so clearly. And the brilliant visual imagery carries very directly over.
G. S. Fraser
PLATH, JARRELL, KINNELL, SMITH
ARIEL. By Sylvia Plath. Harper. $4.95.
THE Lo.ST Wo.RLD. By Randall Jarrell. Macmillan. $3.95.
FLOWER HERDING o.N Mo.UNT Mo.NADNo.CK. By Galway Kinnell.
Houghton Mifflin. $3.00.
THE TIN CAN and OTHER Po.EMS. By William Jay Smith. Delacorte.
$4.00.
If
Sylvia Plath's performance were not so securely knowledge–
able, so cannily devised, so richly inventive and so meticulously reined,
it would be intolerable. Many of these poems are magnificent; a whole
book of them is top-heavy, teetering on that point where the seIf–
created figure threatens to topple over into self-expression and the
diversions of psychopathology. Reaching for a poet with whom to com–
pare her, or in whose sphere of influence to "place" her-and only the
illustrious will do-one hesitates before Blake (too "big," too masculine,
too mythopoeic), before Baudelaire (too much the
poseur,
too
raffine,
perhaps too comfortable in his rancor), and stops at Emily Dickinson.
But anguish in Emily Dickinson is a consequence; it partakes of a
classical notion of anguish: the great heart victimized by its own human–
ity. In Sylvia Plath, by contrast, anguish is not a consequence but the
whole relentless subject itself. In her vision the primary colors of anguish,
