Posted by Ron Price In the summer of 1962, the same summer I went pioneering, the poet Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes separated. That fall and winter, Sylvia wrote her now famous Ariel poems. In these poems Plath expressed a certain rage, her obsession with death and she tried to reconstruct how people feel at crucial moments in their lives. Plath believed she could only write spontaneously in poetry what she had long learned to do by force of habit. There is a psychotic, schizoid, element in her poetry and her life and this element led to her suicide in February 1963 and, in those last months, to her best poetry. There is a brusque, businesslike and b###hy quality to these poems. They displayed a talent, a poetry which bloomed after years of intense cultivation.-Ron Price with thanks to David Holbrook, Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, The Athlone Press, University of London, 1976. I was just starting out, that summer, My poetic training came much later, I, too, had my Ariel poems, 1 The summer of 1962 was the beginning of my pioneering story. Link: http://bahaipioneering.bahaisite.com/
on 4/6/2004, 2:01 pm
203.221.7.36
JUST A FLAME REMAINING
when Ted walked out of your life.1
The '50s and early '60s were my youth
when you were training as a poet
and I was training for life.
for me the '80s, the '90s,
into the new millennium.
I had slowly, unobtrusively, become
naturally cheerful, briskly efficient,
dealing with my private sickness.
my poems of defeat,
candle burnt out,
just the flame remaining
thirty years later
in the fourth epoch
at an auspicious juncture
in the history of the Cause.2
2 The year 1992 was a turning point for me in writing poetry.
Ron Price
January 31 2004
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