The lyric poem, like the artist's self-portrait, often turns on a mode of subjectification that relates to other people. The poet and painter alike depict themselves as they want to be perceived by others, even if the techniques and motifs by which those depictions are constructed also serve to abstract, obscure, distance or even mask the 'self '. Although Sylvia Plath's poetry is widely considered an exemplary instance of this model of self-mythologisation, her self-portraits also demonstrate an artistic investment in the concept of the mask as an index to the subjective self. Her painting Triple-face portrait (1950-1951), for instance, features a cubist-inspired woman with purple, green, and blue hair framing a large, divided face, painted yellow on the left and brown on the right. Composed while Plath was in her final years of study at Smith College, the portrait's dramatically fragmented appearance underscores her interest in conflicted identities; an interest that would later come to the fore in well-known poems such as Daddy, Lady Lazarus and The Applicant. And yet, painting and lyric poetry are ultimately different modes of representation, each with their own aesthetic principles, formal techniques and systems of signs. ... Although volumes of archival material show Plath to be a vastly multidimensional artist, working across drawing, mosaic, collage, painting, photography, other visual mediums, the above journal entry affirms the primacy of rhetorical, linguistic and imagistic written expression to her method for representing the self. In this way, the development of Plath's visual poetics can be traced back to an "internalized principle of visual thinking" that powerfully informs the affective and aesthetic principles of her work. Taken together, Plath's self-portraits and her poetry instantiate an artistic system of the subject as "metaphorized into a Mirror" where the "speaker's self can be understood as either the gazing subject or the gazed object." Even though it is clear that Plath’s pictorial techniques materialize in her verse, her poetry nevertheless stakes a claim for the lyric’s capacity to complicate notions of subjectivity, interiority and perception in ways that exceed the boundaries of visual art. With this artistic formulation in view, in this article I examine what I call Plath’s ‘facial poetics’ in the context of a long arc of Plath scholarship that has been disproportionately focused on a poetics of the body, biography, and death. With attention to the critical milieu that spurred the rise of confessional poetry in the United States in the late 1950s, I situate Plath's poetry of the face as both motif and technique alongside the dominant trope of the ‘removed mask’ that came to define the formal strategies and motivations of confessional verse.
Tyne Daile Sumner (Mon,) studied this question.