Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries

Exploitation, larceny, masochism, sensationalism: the terms of opprobrium hurled against Sylvia Plath's use of Holocaust material generally accord with George Steiner's distress at any writer boasting "the right to put on this death-rig." 1 In 1962, the same year Plath wrote "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Adorno qualified his famous injunction against the barbarism of composing poetry after Auschwitz. 2 Nevertheless, her appropriation of the voices of Holocaust victims still seems outrageous to those who reject any reasonable affinity or parallelism between Plath's individual suffering and mass murder. These readers wonder: how dare she presume to imagine herself as one of the victims, to arrogate the Otherness of the deceased through a projection that might be said to profane the memory of people exterminated by the Nazis? To honor the dead, Elie Wiesel has cautioned, the living must comprehend that "no one has the right to speak on their behalf." 3 To some, Plath's non-Jewishness, and her lack of a personal stake in the disaster, makes her speaking on behalf of the victims appear like a desecration. However, Plath's adoption of the voices of the imagined, absent dead--her deployment of the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia--is hardly anomalous. The same rhetorical device surfaces in some of the most powerful poems about the Shoah, poems composed by literary women and men with quite divergent relationships to the calamity. The impersonation of an absent speaker or a personification--prosopopoei--allows those poets searching to find a language for the staggering horror of what had happened to speak as, for, with, and about the casualties in verse. This enabling device has been either ignored or disparaged for too long.