I’m starting a free new online lecture series I’m calling Lectures in Poetry Seminar (LIPS) and the first poem we’ll study with a close, line by line, reading is Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” my contender for her greatest lyric accomplishment among many others.
A little teaser about the title and opening three lines, or first stanza.
Lady Lazarus marries into/transgenders a key figure of New Testament history: Lazarus, the only person in the Gospels to be resurrected from the dead besides Christ himself. (My own poet brain can’t help hearing Lady Liberty by Emma Lazarus, a red herring, perhaps, but recall that Plath’s first book was The Colossus and imagined her dead father as a gigantic looming figure whom she, in a sense, continues to live inside.)
These lines are piercingly direct and hold not a single image. Something it took Plath time to go without, from the lush formalism of her earlier work, to the scalpel intensity and hallucinatory imagery of the final years. I’m particularly struck by the “it” of line 1 and line 3. Is the “it” the ritualistic attempt at suicide, drawn upon real life lived experience, or the “it” of imaginative resurrection? It’s ambiguous, but the consequences of how you read that “it” could not point in more starkly different emphases. Also note the clever way in which the word “man” is smuggled into “I managed it,” anticipating the iconic last line: “And I ear men like air.”
Anyway…
I want to discuss her profound craft and troubled reception history; her bold use of appropriation and racism; her glorious gender rage and internal contradictions. Some critics have treated the poem as an ode to death and self-harm, evidence of a pathological nihilism, or Plath relishing in self-pity and destruction. But it also can be read (without sanitizing nor sidestepping its provocations) as an imaginative plea for surviving the unsurvivable through art.
The lecture will stream for free on Substack Live this Sunday evening, June 14th. Details to follow.
If you’re interested in joining us, feel free to respond to this post or email me at thefriendisthefriend@gmail.com.
Hello, I am interested to join it :))