Proms Plus Literary - Sylvia Plath
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2013
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath and the publication of her novel, The Bell Jar, the writer, Lavinia Greenlaw and the critic, Sally Bayley, look back on the legacy of a remarkable poet with readings by Buffy Davis. Born in Boston in 1932 Plath moved to England to study at Cambridge where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published here in 1960. In 1962 she wrote most of the poems which would form her best known collection, Ariel. She died in February 1963 during one of the most severe winters on record in Britain. Ariel and The Bell Jar were published after her death. Recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music as part of this year's Proms Plus events.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.4 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids |
| 0:25.5 | the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
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| 0:42.6 | Sylvia Plath wrote poetry and fiction in a voice so distinctive that it now seems to constitute a mode of its own. |
| 0:50.7 | We don't talk as much about the Plathian as we do about the Dickensian or the Byronic. |
| 0:56.2 | But when you read her work, her collections, the Colossus and Ariel, for instance, or her only |
| 1:01.6 | novel, the Bell Jar, you're hearing something that you hear nowhere else. She's also part of that |
| 1:07.3 | small band of artists whose name has travelled beyond the literary, like Stendarm |
| 1:12.7 | and List, she's given her name to a medical term, the Sylvia Plath effect. Plath liked |
| 1:19.0 | sunbathing, she liked basketball, she liked sweet sherry, she liked Ouija boards. She was also |
| 1:24.9 | a Beethoven fan, and as we'll hear tonight, the music of Beethoven is legible in her writing, in the bell jar perhaps, particularly. |
| 1:32.3 | Tonight we're going to breathe the atmosphere of her work with two who know it well, the poet Lavinia Greenlaw and the literary historian Sally Bailey. |
| 1:41.3 | Let's start with the bell jar. It's a write of passage for many readers, |
| 1:46.1 | isn't it, Lavinia? How did you discover it? I discovered it like any other sort of overheated |
| 1:51.8 | teenage girl and read it avidly and didn't understand its influence on me for a very long time. |
| 2:01.2 | Do people read it at the wrong moment then, Gugner? |
| 2:03.6 | Or is that really the right moment to read it? |
| 2:05.6 | I think it's the right moment to read it because if you are that kind of person looking |
... |
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