Sylvia Plath would have turned 81 years old today. It’s a strange thing to imag­ine. Plath’s rep­u­ta­tion as a poet is so sad­ly bound up with her death by sui­cide at the age of 30, and so many of the lines in her lat­er poet­ry sound like sui­cide notes, that it seems impos­si­ble to pic­ture her mak­ing it to old age. In “Lady Lazarus,” Plath writes: “Dying/Is an art, like every­thing else./I do it excep­tion­al­ly well.”

Plath is remem­bered main­ly for the poems she wrote in the last half year of her life, when she had sep­a­rat­ed from her hus­band, the poet Ted Hugh­es. It was then that Plath found her “real voice,” as Hugh­es put it, in a marathon burst of cre­ativ­i­ty that result­ed in the com­po­si­tion of some 70 poems, over half of which were col­lect­ed in her posthu­mous book, Ariel.

But the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing Plath’s final days–her anger and sense of betray­al over her hus­band’s infi­deli­ty, her deci­sion to kill her­self by turn­ing on the gas and plac­ing her head in an unlight­ed oven while her two young chil­dren slept in anoth­er room–have com­pli­cat­ed her lit­er­ary lega­cy. A mor­bid cult has sur­round­ed Plath, with many of her most fer­vent admir­ers gloss­ing over the poet­’s long strug­gle with men­tal ill­ness to find in her a mar­tyred fem­i­nist saint, a mod­ern Ophe­lia.

“It has fre­quent­ly been asked whether the poet­ry of Plath would have so aroused the atten­tion of the world if Plath had not killed her­self,” writes Janet Mal­colm in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hugh­es. “I would agree with those who say no. The death-rid­den poems move us and elec­tri­fy us because of our knowl­edge of what hap­pened.” It’s a shame, because Plath’s achieve­ment should be judged on its own mer­its. In 2000, Joyce Car­ol Oates described some of the qual­i­ties she admired in Plath’s writ­ing:

The most mem­o­rable of Sylvia Plath’s incan­ta­to­ry poems, many of them writ­ten dur­ing the final, tur­bu­lent weeks of her life, read as if they’ve been chis­eled, with a fine sur­gi­cal instru­ment, out of Arc­tic ice. Her lan­guage is taught and orig­i­nal; her strat­e­gy elip­ti­cal; such poems as “Les­bos,” “The Munich Man­nequins,” “Par­a­lyt­ic,” “Dad­dy” (Plath’s most noto­ri­ous poem), and “Edge” (Plath’s last poem, writ­ten in Feb­ru­ary, 1963), and the pre­scient “Death & Co.” linger long in the mem­o­ry, with the pow­er of malev­o­lent nurs­ery rhymes. For Plath, “The blood jet is poet­ry,” and read­ers who might know lit­tle of the poet­’s pri­vate life can nonethe­less feel the authen­tic­i­ty of Plath’s recur­ring emo­tions: hurt, bewil­der­ment, rage, sto­ic calm, bit­ter res­ig­na­tion. Like the great­est of her pre­de­ces­sors, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Plath under­stood that poet­ic truth is best told slant­wise, in as few words as pos­si­ble.

Oates called Plath “our acknowl­edged Queen of Sor­rows, the spokes­woman for our most pri­vate, most help­less night­mares.” The poem above, “A Birth­day Present,” is one of the pri­vate and night­mar­ish poems col­lect­ed in Ariel. Plath wrote it just over half a cen­tu­ry ago as she was con­tem­plat­ing the approach of her 30th birth­day, and some­thing dark­er. The record­ing is from a BBC broad­cast in Decem­ber of 1962, only two months before Plath’s death. (You can read the text as you lis­ten.) In his 1966 fore­ward to the first U.S. edi­tion of Ariel, the poet Robert Low­ell made the fol­low­ing assess­ment of Plath:

Sui­cide, father-hatred, self-loathing–nothing is too much for the macabre gai­ety of her con­trol. Yet it is too much; her art’s immor­tal­i­ty is life’s dis­in­te­gra­tion. The sur­prise, the shim­mer­ing, unwrapped birth­day present, the tran­scen­dence “into the red eye, the caul­dron of morn­ing,” and the lover, who are always wait­ing for her, are Death, her own abrupt and defi­ant death.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dylan Thomas Recites ‘Do Not Go Gen­tle into That Good Night’ and Oth­er Poems

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl

Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fif­teen Poems From Her Final Col­lec­tion, Ariel, in 1962 Record­ing

In this rare record­ing from 1939, Ezra Pound gives a pas­sion­ate read­ing of his ear­ly work about a war­mon­ger­ing 12th cen­tu­ry trou­ba­dour, a poem called “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte.”

The poem was writ­ten in ear­ly 1909, when Pound was an ambi­tious 23-year-old Amer­i­can liv­ing in Lon­don. At that time Pound was in the habit of spend­ing hours every day por­ing over books in the British Muse­um read­ing room.

“I resolved that at thir­ty I would know more about poet­ry than any man liv­ing,” wrote Pound, “that I would know the dynam­ic con­tent from the shell, that I would know what was account­ed poet­ry every­where, what part of poet­ry was ‘inde­struc­tible,’ what part could not be lost by trans­la­tion, and–scarcely less impor­tant what effects were obtain­able in one lan­guage only and were utter­ly inca­pable of being trans­lat­ed.”

In pur­suit of this goal, Pound “learned more or less of nine for­eign lan­guages.” Among those was Occ­i­tan, or Langue d’oc, the lan­guage of the medieval trou­ba­dours. Pound had become fas­ci­nat­ed with the trou­ba­dours while studing romance lit­er­a­ture at Hamil­ton Col­lege and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. One fig­ure who espe­cial­ly intrigued him was Bertran de Born, the late-12th cen­tu­ry noble­man, war­rior and trou­ba­dour who was immor­tal­ized by Dante Alighieri in Can­to XXVIII of the Infer­no as one of the sow­ers of dis­cord in Cir­cle Eight, con­demned to be hacked to pieces over and over again for his role in foment­ing a quar­rel between King Hen­ry II of Eng­land and his sons Richard II (the “Lion­heart”) and Prince Hen­ry. In John Cia­rdi’s trans­la­tion of the Infer­no, Dante describes the hideous fig­ure of Bertran, his head cut off for the sin of sow­ing dis­cord between kins­men:

I saw it there; I seem to see it still–
a body with­out a head, that moved along
like all the oth­ers in that spew and spill.

It held the sev­ered head by its own hair,
swing­ing it like a lantern in its hand;
and the head looked at us and wept in its despair.

It made itself a lamp of its own head,
and they were two in one and one in two;
how this can be, He knows who so com­mand­ed. 

Pound would even­tu­al­ly trans­late sev­er­al of Bertran’s sur­viv­ing poems, but he found it dif­fi­cult. He decid­ed first to write his own poem in the voice of Bertran, incor­po­rat­ing blood­thirsty images from the medieval poet­’s own verse and set­ting the new poem in the 12th cen­tu­ry Ses­ti­na form, which orig­i­nat­ed with the trou­ba­dours of south­ern France. In his essay “How I Began,” Pound recalls the com­po­si­tion of “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte”:

I had De Born on my mind. I had found him untrans­lat­able. Then it occurred to me that I might present him in this man­ner. I want­ed the curi­ous invo­lu­tion and recur­rence of the Ses­ti­na. I knew more or less of the arrange­ment. I wrote the first stro­phe and then went to the Muse­um to make sure of the right order of per­mu­ta­tions, for I was then liv­ing in Lang­ham Street, next to the “pub,” and had hard­ly any books with me. I did the rest of the poem at a sit­ting. Tech­ni­cal­ly it is one of my best, though a poem of such a theme could nev­er be very impor­tant.

The Ses­ti­na is a com­plex form with 39 lines (six stan­zas of six lines each fol­lowed by an envoi of three lines) all end­ing with one of six words that are grouped togeth­er in each stan­za. For “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte,” Pound chose the words “clash,” “crim­son,” “oppos­ing,” “rejoic­ing,” “music” and “peace.” The images of clash­ing swords and crim­son blood earned Pound’s poem the nick­name “Bloody Ses­ti­na.” It was the first of his poems to make it into Ford Mad­dox Huef­fer­’s pres­ti­gious Eng­lish Review. When Pound recit­ed the poem in 1909 at a gath­er­ing of poets at a Lon­don restau­rant, he report­ed­ly put so much pas­sion into his per­for­mance that “the table shook and cut­lery vibrat­ed in res­o­nance with his voice.”

That same pas­sion can be heard in the record­ing above, made thir­ty years lat­er when Pound was vis­it­ing Amer­i­ca for the first time in 28 years. It was record­ed on May 17, 1939 in the Wood­ber­ry Poet­ry Room at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty. For dra­mat­ic effect, Pound accom­pa­nied him­self on a ket­tle­drum. To read the words of “Ses­ti­na: Altaforte” as you lis­ten to Pound’s voice, click here to open the text in a new win­dow. And to hear all of Pound’s 1939 record­ings, go to PennSound, where you can hear those record­ings and many more by Pound.