Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. Listen, I was staying at someone's

house and in the bedroom where I slept, there was a bookcase full of books and you know

other people's bookcases are always more intriguing and attractive than your own. So I went

into it investigatively and I saw Sylvia Plath's novel, The Belger, which I never read and

knew very little about. I read it and I was only at the house for a week but I increased the

amount of time I read the novel each day because I was desperate to finish it before the end

of the week. I did so. I thought it was brilliant. It's described as an autobiographical novel

which I always think is a bit of a diss. It makes it sound as if someone really has written

an autobiography and then plugged it off as an awful enough and putting any of that artistry

and creativity and inventiveness that one associates with the novelist. I found a lot of artistry,

inventiveness and creativity in The Belger, but there you go. I think Sylvia Plath's poetry

suffers from a similar problem in that it's often described as confessional poetry and so

again people think oh yeah well they're just churning out their life and some people love that

but I think that that undermines the work. I think it's much cleverer than that and also if it was

just Sylvia's life blasted out then I think it would fall into the trap that W.B. Yates the Irish

poet identified which is all that is personal soon rots. We need something universal to hold on to

in poetry. Something that every reader can use to find themselves in the work and I think that

that does happen in Plath. I don't want to drag her away from the black fingernail grasp of

emo fandom but I think it's harmful to just define Sylvia Plath as a tragic figure who took her

own life and had a terrible husband and terrible parents. Let's just concentrate on the brilliant poet

aspect. I found myself nervous saying this. I feel I'm going to be

attacked in the night by Helen of Bonham Carter or someone of that ilk. Okay so that's what I think

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