Sylvia Plath. Portret în cerneală

1. ”The Extremist artist sets out deliberately to explore
the roots of his emotions, the obscurest springs of his
personality, maybe even the sickness he feels himself to
be pray to, giving himself over to it, for the sake of the
range and intensity of his art.” (A. Alvarez, Under
Pressure, Penguin, New York, 1965, p. 185).
2. “…zeu al cultelor pastorale… vioi, ager, iute şi
prefăcut: exprimă şiretenia bestială….De la numele său
vine acela al panicii, al terorii care se răspândeşte în
toată natura şi în întreaga fiinţă, al sentimentului pe
care-l trezeşte prezenţa acestui zeu ce tulbură mintea şi
înnebuneşte simţurile. Despuiat de această senzualitate
primară de nestăvilit, va personifica mai târziu Marele
Tot, totul unei anume fiinţe.” (Jean Chevalier, Alain
Gheerbrant, Dicţionar de simboluri, vol. III, Editura
Artemis, Bucureşti, 1993, pp. 11, 12).
3. “Confessional poets were radically skeptical in terms
of belief. Their writing presumes that depth in poetry
is not to be had by recourse to philosophical concepts
or religious doctrines, or even by the representation of
extraordinary moments of vision. For subject matter,
Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, Plath and Snodgrass
turned to autobiography, or what was meant to pass
for autobiography” (The Cambridge History of
American Literature, Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vol. VIII,
Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 126).
4. Annette Levers, The World as Icon. On Sylvia Plath’s
Themes, în The Art of Sylvia Plath, Ed. Charles
Newman, Bloomington, Indiana University Press,
1973, p. 135.
5. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ed. by Ted Hughes,
Ballantine Books, 1982 apud. Mircea Mihăieş, Cărţile
crude. Jurnalul intim şi sinuciderea, Iaşi, Polirom, 2005,
p. 71.
6. “Throughout The Colossus she is using her art to keep
the disturbance, out of which she made her verse, at a
distance…She has style, but not properly her own
style.” (A. Alvarez, Sylvia Plath în The Art of Sylvia
Plath, op. cit, p.58).
7. “She said (Sylvia Plath) in a note written for BBC:
“These new poems of mine have one thing in common.
They were all written at about four in the morning –
that still blue, almost eternal hour before the baby’s
cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his
bottles” (Ibidem, p. 59).
8. “The idea of some sort of identity between the poet’s
mind and the society in which it operates encompasses
a broad range: at one extreme, the poet completely
conscious of his own separate existence, may see
himself as microcosm of what surrounds him or the
world as macrocosm of what is inside him; at the other
extreme, the boundries between inner and outer world
may be so eroded that they can no longer be
distinguished. Sylvia Plath’s strength lays in the ability
to achieve a balance of the two extremes, allowing her
mind to explore beyond all customary limits the
boundries of the self…” (M. L. Rosenthal, The New
Poets, New York, Oxford University Press, 1967, p.
245).
9. Octavio Paz, Copiii mlaştinii, Ed. Dacia, Cluj-
Napoca, 2003, p. 64.
10. Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath,
Cambridge Massachusetts, Harvard University Press,
1992, p. 5.
11. Mircea Mihăieş, op. cit., pp. 76-77.
12. Rorschach apud Gilbert Durand, Structurile
antropologice ale imaginarului, Bucureşti, Ed. Univers
Enciclopedic, 2000, p. 87.
13. Gilbert Durand, op. cit., p. 87.
14. Ibidem, pp. 94-95.
15. M. L. Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 84.
16. Apud Mircea Mihăieş, op. cit., pp. 76-79.
17. Ibidem, p. 73.
18. Caroline King Barnard, Sylvia Plath, Boston, G. K.
Hall & co., 1978, p. 16.
19. Octavio Paz, op. cit., p. 130.
20. “The child is the principle, the fountainhead of all
life and hope. His self is not yet <<bald and
shiny>>, he is <<vague as the fog>>…a vagueness
imbued with infinite possibilities… He is akin to the
elements, the sea, the wind, the clouds <<with no
strings attached and no reflections>> (as written
elsewhere, in Gulliver).” (Annette Levers, op. cit., p.
123).
21. Apud Mircea Mihăieş, op. cit., p. 72.
22. Octavio Paz, op. cit., p. 131.
23. Radin, African Folktales and Sculpture apud Jerome
Mazzaro, Postmodern American Poetry, University of
Illinois Press, 1980, p. 150.
24. “…a genuine confessional poem has to be superbly
successful artistically if it is to achieve this fusion of the
private and the culturally symbolic, but it must at any
rate be far more highly charged than the usual poem.”
(M. L. Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 69).
25. “the poems constitute <<an act of identification,
of total communion with those tortured and
massacred>>”(George Steiner apud Mazzaro, op. cit.,
p. 158).
26. “The honours paper that Plath eventually did on
the double – not in Joyce but Dostoevsky – would have
lent to these processes of meditation an almost
psychoanalytic concept of the double. The concept
would be based on opposition rather than congruence.
The opposition would add up either to a third figure
containing both ot to a cancellation of what each halffigure
represents.” (Jerome Mazzaro, op. cit., p. 148).
27. Françoise Dastur, Moartea. Eseu despre finitudine,
Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2006, p. 17.
28. “…there is a strange muse, bald, white, and wild, in
her <<hood of bone>> floating over a landscape
like that of the primitive painters, a burningly
luminous vision of a Paradise. A Paradise which is at
the same time eerily frightening, an unalterably spotlit
vision of death.” (Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath în Poetry
Book Society Bulletin (London), nr. 44, februarie,
1965, p. 1).
29. “Apa devine chiar o invitaţie directă la moarte; din
simfalică cum era, se <<ofelizează>>…Ne vom opri
la un aspect secundar al apei nocturne, şi care poate juca
rolul de motivaţie subalternă: lacrimile. Lacrimi care
pot introduce direct tema înecului…Apa ar fi legată de
lacrimi printr-un proces intim, ele ar fi, atât apa cât şi
lacrimile <<materie a disperării>>” (Gilbert
Durand, op. cit., pp. 91-93).
30. Ibidem, pp. 92-93.
31. Georges Bataille, Erotismul, Ed. Nemira, Bucureşti,
2005, p. 27.