PARTISAN REVIEW
357
whatever unpredictable violence he senses in himself. Then gradually,
as in a case of demonic possession, the animals begin to take over;
the portraits turn into soliloquies in which murder is no longer dis–
guised or excused, the poet himself becomes both predator and prey
of his own inner violence. Like the Yugoslav poet Vasco Popa,
Hughes exercises strict control over his private monsters by making
them subject to arbitrary rules, as in some psychotic child's game,
but he also carries the hunt on into the darkness with exceptional
single-mindedness.
It is with Sylvia Plath that the Extremist impulse becomes total
and, literally, final. In the briefest terms, her dissatisfaction with
the elegant, rather arty style of her early poems more or less coin–
cided with the appearance of
Life Studies.
Lowell proved that it was
possible to write about these things without sinking into the witless
morals of "confessional" verse. And this was the excuse she had been
waiting for, the key to unlock the reserves of pain which had built up
steadily since her father's premature death when she was a child and
her own suicide attempt at the age of twenty. In the mass of brilliant
poems which poured out in the last few months of her life she took
Lowell's example to its logical conclusion, systematically exploring
the nexus of anger,
guilt,
rejection, love and destructiveness which
made her finally take her own life.
It
is as though she had decided
that, for her poetry to be valid, it must tackle head-on nothing less
serious than her own death, bringing to it a greater wealth of inven–
tion and sardonic energy than most poets manage in a lifetime of
so-called affirmation.
If
the road had seemed impassable, she proved that it wasn't.
It was, however, one-way, and she went too far along it to be able,
in the end, to turn back. Yet her actual suicide, like Lowell's break–
downs or the private horrors of Berryman and Hughes, is by the
way; it adds nothing to her work and proves nothing about it. It was
simply a risk she took in handling such volatile material. Indeed,
what the Extremists have in common is not a style but a belief in
the value, even the necessity, of risk. They do not deny it like our
latter-day aesthetes, nor drown it in the benign, warm but profoundly
muddied ocean of hippy love and inarticulateness. This determina–
tion to confront the intimations not of immortality but of mortality
itself, using every imaginative resource and technical skill to bring
it close, understand it, accept it, control it, is finally what distinguishes
