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In his exploratory study of modern American poets, economist David Galenson limited his analysis to 11 outstandinge c innovators who averaged more than three poems per anthology. Of the 11, five were finders and six were seekers.
The five conceptual poets range from level-headed Richard Wilbur to suicidal Sylvia Plath and institutionalized Ezra Pound, but they all achieved their greatest successes at a young age.
Typical traits of finders that can be found in this group’s reliance on literary traditions, focus on the poet’s interior life, and works based on the poet’s distinctive ideas about what poetry should be like.
Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963: young genius, then
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Sylvia Plath, young suicidal genius
“Daddy,” which Plath wrote shortly before her suicide at age 31, is tied for the position of seventh most frequently reprinted modern American poem. Two excerpts:
Daddy
…
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
…
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
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nothing
If not for her early death, intense, troubled Sylvia Plath could serve as an archetype of a conceptual poet – success at an early age, focus on interior rather than exterior realities, ability to write poems quickly and then move on. But because of her suicide at age 31, it’s meaningless to say that her youthful work was more successful than her later works.¬ there were no later works.
At age 30 she wrote the two pieces, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” that appear on the list of the 20 most frequently reprinted modern American poems.
Characteristics of conceptual poets that she embodied included her ability to start and finish a poem in a day. Another was her focus on emotion rather than observation, as she piled up metaphors that dramatized her surreally imaginative world.
For poet Stephen Spender, her works presented a “dark and ominous landscape. The landscape is an entirely interior, mental one in which external objects have become converted into symbols of hysterical vision.”
In a list of poets ranked by the total reprints of their poems in anthologies, Plath is No. 7, with a total of 205 -- three-quarters of them written in the final two years of her life.
Excluding all verse by poets who were age 32 and older, Plath is America’s most popular poet – the No. 1 poet, by the quantitiy of reprints of just their youthful works.
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