The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: Crash Course Literature 216 - YouTube (2)

of humanity and our ineradicable hope.

Plath is trying to give up and just lie still in the absolute white, but those two exciting

tulips are pulling her back into the world.

Everything is white and quiet and snowed-in, but those tulips, we read, are "too red...they hurt me."

This poem, for me at least, captures the difficulty of being a person, but also what's rewarding about being a person.

We are called to attentiveness even when it's painful.

I think Sylvia Plath often gets a bad rap precisely because her poetry resonates with teenagers.

And I think it's a little bit unfair. Yes, there are times when she romanticizes

death and self-injury, and I don't like it when she does that.

But there is astonishing emotional authenticity in her poems, and she manages it without irony.

And that incredible frankness in Plath's writing is what I think makes it endure. It all feels true.

Her focused observation of the world around her, the pupil that has to take everything

in, that was a great gift to us because by keeping her eyes open as long as she did,

she helped us to keep ours open. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

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