A Comparative Study of Emotional Anguish in the Poetry of Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath

An Essay on Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath

A Comparative Study of Emotional Anguish in the Poetry of Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath

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This essay compares how Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath represent emotional anguish in their poetry through the themes of Holocaust representation and death. These themes are analysed through the components of the poets’ construction of a nightmarish landscape and their relationship with language. The nightmarish landscape is used to explore the imagery of their poetry relating to context and setting; and assessment of language is used to compare how Celan and Plath utilise incongruous and surrealist imagery, repetition, and the failings of language. Holocaust representation and death feature in both components and, therefore, provide the opportunity to interpret the poets’ expression of emotional anguish.

     Whilst the poets’ relationships with the Holocaust and the causal factors of their psychological states differ significantly, it is the utilisation of these themes that provide the foundation for a comparative study. Celan had direct personal experience of the Holocaust. His time in a forced labour camp in Southern Moldavia and the loss of his parents at a camp in Transnistria – his father having died of typhus and his mother having been shot^[1] – means that his articulation of anguish is strongly linked to his Holocaust experiences. Celan’s poetic vision is created by his anguished past, therefore the study of Holocaust representation and anguish in his work are not entirely distinct categories: one is dependent upon the other. Plath had no personal experience of the Holocaust, unlike Celan, but she expresses her kinship towards those who had when she describes her lineage as being part ‘German [Father’s side] and Austrian [Mother’s side]’, therefore justifying her ‘concern with concentration camps’.^[2] Despite her spatiotemporal distance from the Holocaust, its importance to her work and in depicting her psychological anguish is qualified by Young when he states that ‘Plath . . . refracted her private pain through the images of Auschwitz’.^[3] Auschwitz here is synonymous with Jewish victimisation and suffering in which Plath found ‘the closest parallel in her own torture’.^[4] It is because she imaginatively engages with the Holocaust that she is able to empathise with those who suffered and to recognise the suffering and anguish in herself.^[5]

     To develop a broader understanding of Celan’s and Plath’s work, it is necessary to also consider their preoccupation with death as a means to represent emotional anguish. For Celan this is, arguably, caused by his Holocaust experiences; and for Plath it is based in her relationship with her father and her own suicidal tendencies. However, analysis will show that for both, their depiction of death is not always reified through Holocaust imagery.

     This study of emotional anguish and Holocaust representation in Celan’s and Plath’s poetry is distinct from previous scholarship and comparative studies. They have both been studied individually in the fields of Holocaust and trauma studies. Examples of previous comparative scholarship include: Mitgutsch’s: ‘Weltverlust in der zeitgenossischen lyrik, exemplarisch dargestellt an Paul Celan und Sylvia Plath’. In this essay, Mitgutsch explores the ‘existentialist tendencies in both poets’ and the theme of world loss.^[6] Rowland compares Celan and Plath in Holocaust Poetry considering the ‘stylistic similarities between “Lady Lazarus”, “Mary’s Song” and Celan’s poetry’.^[7] Rowland considers, for example, how ‘Todesfuge’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ are both ‘monologues spoken . . . by victims of the Nazis’, how Plath’s ‘burlesque [in “Lady Lazarus”] links with the danse macabre in “Todesfuge”’, and the way that surrealist imagery connects their work.^[8] Finally, Stone compares Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ with Plath’s ‘Little Fugue’ considering the ‘personification of death’ and examining Celan’s influence on Plath, ‘psychologically, historically, and poetically’.^[9]

     Samuels, in her study of Celan, commented that art ‘will allow the individual to explore the human condition and the anguish of being’.^[10] Looking at Celan’s art through the concept of the nightmarish landscape allows the reader to see how his anguish of being is depicted. ‘Death Fugue’, arguably Celan’s most famous Holocaust poem, is built on and contextualised by a nightmarish landscape. The introduction of:

‘Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night’ (Death Fugue, l.1,2) ^[11]

becomes the all-consuming, intoxicating refrain throughout the poem, indicating the anguish of those who are forced to drink black milk. Symbolically, milk, which is naturally wholesome and white, is now unwholesome and black. The nightmare here is literally being digested. The unwholesomeness is reinforced by the incongruity of the ‘Jews out in earth’ digging their own graves while the German attendant ‘whistles’ and ‘commands’ them to ‘strike up for the dance’ (Death Fugue, l.10-11). The nightmare landscape is continued by the action of the Jewish people digging downwards who, once murdered, ‘will rise into air’ like smoke where they will have a ‘grave . . . in the clouds’ (Death Fugue, l.33-34).^[12] This vertical axis of downwards and upwards motion, in conjunction with the flashing stars in the first stanza (Death Fugue, l.8), means that the physicality of the nightmare landscape is located within the earth, then extends to the graves in the clouds, and continues upwards to the astronomical heights of the stars. The nightmare of the Holocaust camp then is inescapable: the anguish is entwined with the setting, embedded in the action of digging graves, in the humiliation of enforced dancing, through the repetitive drinking of black milk, and death. Death is crucial to the impoverished emotional state, and the line ‘death is a master from Germany’ (Death Fugue, l.30, 36, 39, 43) is repeated multiple times, becoming the unequivocal Holocaust representative of the nightmare landscape and the cause of Celan’s anguish.

     In ‘Death Fugue’ Holocaust representation is inseparably connected to Celan’s emotional anguish: the nightmare landscape is located within a Holocaust setting. In his poem ‘Snow-Bed’, however, Holocaust representation is not overt but emotional anguish prevails in the nightmarish landscape. The first stanza places the reader in the narrator’s unsettling predicament:

‘Eyes, world-blind, in the fissure of dying: I come,

callous growth in my heart.

I come.’ (Snow-Bed, l.1-3)^[13]

This landscape is the ultimate setting for causing emotional anguish: the narrator, taken to be Celan himself, enters the world of the dying through a fissure in the earth. The narrator’s ‘callous growth’ in his ‘heart’ (Snow-Bed, l.2) not only portrays his emotional state but foreshadows the nightmarish landscape of the second stanza:

‘Moon-mirror rock-face. Down.

(Shine spotted with breath. Blood in streaks.

Soul forming clouds, close to the true shape once more.

Ten-finger shadow, clamped).’ (Snow-Bed, l.4-7)^[14]

The ‘Moon-mirror rock-face’ reifies the alien and disturbing features of the setting which the narrator is forcibly moving ‘Down’ through (Snow-Bed, l.4). The nightmare is compounded by the process of dying: breath is ‘spotted’ against the rock face, indicative of the irregular breathing of the dying; this dying breath is followed by the next stage of demise: blood streaks, followed by the death of the physical body and the transformation into its spiritual mode – the soul (Snow-Bed, l.5,6). The nightmare is so strong that even in death the soul only comes ‘close to’ its ‘true shape once more’, having been prevented by the clamping of the eerie and surreal ‘Ten-finger shadow’ (Snow-Bed, l.6,7). The phasing from breath to blood to soul is punctuated by full stops, emphasising the irrevocability of each phase and causing the reader to pause over the depiction of the nightmare landscape. An important motif featured in the first stanza is repeated in the third:

‘Eyes world-blind,

eyes in the fissure of dying,

eyes eyes’ (Snow-Bed, l.8-10)^[15]

Eyes, Samuels notes, are ‘particularly important, for it is the seeing eye that perceives the layer of observable reality’.^[16]The world-blindness of the eye expresses the transition from the observable, temporal world to the world of death. ‘Snow-Bed’ allows for a consideration of Celan’s preoccupation with death. This is, undoubtedly, caused by his Holocaust experiences, but ‘Snow-Bed’ envisions the world of the dying – removed from Holocaust imagery – to express his emotional anguish, which is qualified in the line: ‘We are one flesh with the night’ (Snow-Bed, l.17).^[17] Night, Samuels notes, is a motif in Celan’s work that ‘is related to . . . death’.^[18]

     The way in which the nightmare landscape operates in Celan’s work can also be identified in Plath’s. Kendall notes in Sylvia Plath A Critical Study that her view of ‘human history . . . consists of variations on one unifying theme: [the] Holocaust’.^[19] This theme is represented in her collection of poems titled: Ariel. Just as ‘Death Fugue’ is Celan’s most obvious portrayal of psychological anguish through unambiguous Holocaust representation, Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ also utilises Holocaust imagery – providing a lens through which to analyse her psychological state. The nightmare landscape is expressed in the following stanza:

‘An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.’ (Daddy, l.31-35)^[20]

The narrator here is considered to be Plath herself: Young states that ‘she may have simultaneously represented them [the narrators of her poems] and used them to represent herself’.^[21] The anguish presented in the Holocaust imagery is mobilised by the repetitious ‘engine’ and perpetuated by the regular ‘chuffing’ of smoke (Daddy, l.31,32). The train also functions synonymously with all trains that took victims to the camps, providing an overwhelming image of suffering which Plath uses to manifest her own anguish. The narrator then identifies herself as a Jew. To contextualise the association with Jewishness and the use of the Holocaust to express anguish, it is useful to quote Young, who states that because ‘the suffering of the Holocaust was not like anything else, it became a referent, a standard, by which subsequent suffering would be measured’.^[22] To indicate anguish through a nightmare landscape, Plath uses the Holocaust imagery of trains, the names of concentration camps – relating it to Celan’s camp setting in ‘Death Fugue’ – and identifies herself with those who suffered most in the Holocaust. Plath, therefore, uses historical ‘violence’ to express her ‘private domain’.^[23]

     The nightmarish setting of feeling like a Jewish person on a train heading to a concentration camp is supported by other associations with the Holocaust. In comparison with Celan, who uses the colour black to symbolise the unnatural, unwholesome setting of his poem, Plath uses it to provide a through line of Holocaust imagery. Blackness is ubiquitous. It symbolises her intense, suffocating anguish through images of Nazi dominion. Plath describes being constrained ‘like a foot/For thirty years’ in a black shoe (Daddy, l.2-4), then magnifies this emotional state, which overwhelms her whole being, by projecting the blackness upwards in the shape of a swastika ‘So black no sky could squeak through’ (Daddy, l.46-47), and finally locates the blackness in the expression of her father’s ‘Meinkampf look’ (Daddy, l.65).^[24] Plath here is using Holocaust representation as the nightmare landscape to convey her emotional anguish associated with her father.

     Holocaust representation has an important function in the depiction and understanding of Plath’s emotional frame of mind, but it is necessary to deviate from it to a consideration of her preoccupation with death: linked to her own suicidal tendencies. Plath’s preoccupation with death provides a point of comparison with Celan, evidenced in his poem ‘Snow-Bed’. In ‘Ariel’ the concern with death and emotional anguish are delivered through the nightmarish landscape in the first lines:

‘Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.’ (Ariel, l.1-3)^[25]

Stasis portrays the narrator’s frame of mind – stuck in emotional darkness. Again, the narrator is interpreted as representing Plath. The transition from internal darkness to the external landscape of ‘substanceless blue’ (Ariel, l.2) allows for no alleviation of the narrator’s suffering or further understanding of the setting. The pararhyme of darkness/distance highlights the unknown quality of the landscape which, without feature, projects the reader back from external setting to internal psyche, reaffirming the narrator’s emotional anguish. The landscape’s further illustration serves to intensify the nightmare experience:

‘Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks–

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through the air–’ (Ariel, l.10-16)^[26]

The distortion of the narrator’s perception of the berries as casting dark hooks to immobilise her, connects to her psychological stasis presented in the first stanza. The digestion, or imaginative internalisation, of the berries as ‘Black sweet blood mouthfuls’ (Ariel, l.13) expresses the narrator’s anguished state, focused by the alliterative black/blood and oxymoronic sweet/blood. The narrator being hauled ‘through the air’ (Ariel, l.16) is later metamorphosed into ‘the arrow . . . that flies/Suicidal . . . Into the red/Eye’ (Ariel, l.27-31).^[27] This description synthesises the nightmare landscape with the narrator’s emotional state and preoccupation with suicide and death. Like Celan, Plath also uses the eye as a motif. The eye, according to Kendall, channels the ‘threat of the outside world’ and in ‘Ariel’ its destruction by the arrow is synonymous with ‘the destruction of the individual’.^[28] The outside world, the nightmare landscape, then becomes integral to the death of the individual. These images are referents of anguish which form part of the overall construction of the nightmare landscape and are expressive of Plath’s preoccupation with death.

     In Celan’s ‘Death Fugue’ and Plath’s ‘Daddy’ the nightmare landscape is key to Holocaust representation and the expression of emotional anguish; and in ‘Snow-Bed’ and ‘Ariel’ the nightmare landscape helps to understand the poets’ preoccupation with death. A consideration of their relationship with language will develop the already established understanding of emotional anguish. Language and syntax will be analysed with reference to Holocaust representation and death.

     In Sense and Finitude Vallega references Gadamer who writes that Celan’s poetry is written ‘without the constraints of logic and syntax’.^[29] This analysis of Celan’s poetics is evidenced in his poem ‘Landscape’ in which Holocaust representation is synonymous with emotional anguish. The first three stanzas are as follows:

‘Landscape with urn creatures.

Conversations

From smoke mouth to smoke mouth.

They eat:

those madhouse truffles, a chunk

of unburied poetry,

found a tongue and a tooth.

A tear rolls back into its eye.’ (Landscape, l.1-8)^[30]

Samuels notes that smoke and urns are important motifs in Celan’s work for depicting the Holocaust.^[31] The combination of the incomplete sentence structures of the first two sentences and the Holocaust images of ‘urn creatures’ and ‘smoke mouth to smoke mouth’ (Landscape, l.1,3) convey emotional anguish through illogical syntax and imagistic incongruity. The human form has metamorphosed into urn creatures whose conversation consists of smoke transferring from mouth to mouth. Conversation, or language, then has been rendered illogical. The surreal concept of the consumption of ‘madhouse truffles’ in the second stanza together with the tear that ‘rolls back into its eye’ (Landscape, l.5,8) of the third continues the illogical language and imagery. It is through the assignment of the truffles to the madhouse, ‘an allusion to the insanity’^[32] of the Holocaust experience, and the tear that should roll downwards but, in fact, rolls upwards, that Celan’s emotional anguish can be identified. Holocaust representation in this poem appears through a use of language that operates without recourse to traditional forms or logic, and it is through this relationship that the reader perceives Celan’s anguished state – the illogical and surreal imagery analogises the dysfunctional aspects of his mind.

     Celan’s break from a logical use of language and adoption of an incongruous and surrealist presentation provides an important means to analyse the way that he portrays emotional anguish. Focusing on the stylistic use of repetition in his poetry expands this understanding. In ‘The Straitening’ repetition is fundamental to the fugal structure^[33] which allows Celan to build on the illustration of anguish and his preoccupation with death through a repeated vocabulary and phraseology. The first stanza of:

‘Driven into the

terrain

with the unmistakable track:

grass, written asunder’ (The Straitening, l.1-4)^[34]

is repeated in the final stanza:

‘Driven into the

terrain

with

the unmistakable

track:

Grass.

Grass,

Written asunder.)’ (The Straitening, l.164-171)^[35]

Asunder, meaning to tear apart violently, expresses the terrain’s unmistakable condition and illustrates Celan’s feeling of anguish: it is akin to feeling torn apart. The repeated phrasing of the two stanzas intensifies the emotion and the change in the structural layout from the first to the last stanza visualises for the reader the terrain’s asunder that Celan is conveying. The terrain then is an important feature of the poem as a tool to express anguish and death, and the repetition of words and phrases used to qualify the setting show this. Repetition of the theme of night and its relationship with death^[36] occurs throughout. Night and nowhere combine to form a setting where anguish and death are embedded. In the first section ‘the night’ is the place where ‘nowhere/does anyone ask after you’ (The Straitening, l.13-15).^[37] This is repeated in the first line of the second section, structurally laid out as follows:

                                                               ‘Nowhere

                                                                                 does anyone ask after you –’

(The Straitening, l.16-17)^[38]

The layout disregards traditional structure and serves to concretise the dislocation and the alien setting – deepening Celan’s anguish and portrayal of death. Night and nowhere become a location for death where no-one will be able to communicate. The repetition of not seeing expressed as ‘They/did not see’^[39] in one stanza and more simply as ‘Did not see’ (The Straitening, l.22,23) in another, taken in conjunction with the condition of being asleep repeated in one section and then in the next,^[40] explores the setting of the poem through a condition akin to death: in which no-one can see or exist in a state of conscious perception. Describing the world as being ‘shot up, shot up’ – then repeated in the opening of the next stanza (The Straitening, l.118,119)^[41] – details Celan’s anguish. The repeated ‘Ash/Ash, ash’ (The Straitening, l.53,54)^[42] synthesises the physical destruction of the world with the condition of death. Repetition is salient to the formation of Celan’s anguish and in conveying his preoccupation with death.

     Celan’s relationship with language moves on from incongruous imagery and illogical representation, and from the use of repetition to a world where language does not serve as an adequate descriptor or fulfil a proper communicative function:

‘To stand in the shadow

of the scar up in the air.

To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.

Unrecognized,

for you

alone.

With all there is room for in that,

even without

language.’ (To Stand, l.1-9)^[43]

In ‘To Stand’ Celan moves away from Holocaust representation and uses language to express emotional anguish through its failings: language itself becomes problematic. The first stanza provides a concept of existing in the shadow which is not clarified by elaboration but further obfuscated: the scar, which is not assigned a reason for its existence, is either metaphorically or literally in the air. It is unclear whether the first stanza is meant metaphorically or literally, whether Celan is in a real or figurative shadow. The expression in this stanza begins to formulate Celan’s emotional anguish through the obfuscating factors that language provides. The second stanza continues the theme of descriptive inefficacy. The use of more language paradoxically fails to explain or elaborate Celan’s setting or predicament: ‘To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing’ (To Stand, l.3). The use of the hyphen, by tightening the phrase, simply reinforces language’s inability to qualify the setting. The difficulty with language is analogised by Celan’s sense of feeling ‘unrecognized’ (To Stand, l.4). Unrecognised here also depicts his inability to use language to describe the world that he inhabits. He states that he exists ‘even without/language’ (To Stand, l.9). These last two lines of the poem point to Celan’s emotional anguish: this world without language, established prosaically by being in a shadow, which is unrecognisable, and where he is alone, is akin to the condition of death. ‘To Stand’ serves to present a devolution of language that initially fails to establish the metaphorical or literal relationship Celan has with the scar and shadow, then precludes him from recognising either himself or his surrounding, and finally places him in a world without language – establishing his emotional anguish and the preoccupation he has with death.

     Celan’s use of incongruous and surrealist imagery to show emotional anguish with recourse to Holocaust imagery in ‘Landscape’ can be compared to Plath’s use of language in ‘Lady Lazarus’. In his poem, Celan metamorphoses the human form, and Plath, too, transforms aspects of the human figure to articulate a feeling of anguish. A contrast lies, however, in the presentation of the transformation: Celan transmogrifies the human figure into the Holocaust image of urns whereas Plath adorns hers with Holocaust iconography. Nevertheless, through either conception it is important to distinguish the fact that it is emotional anguish which prevails. In the second and third stanza of ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath constructs her transformation through the proceeding disfiguration:

‘A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.’ (Lady Lazarus, l.4-9)^[44]

The joining of the dactylic ‘Bright as a’ with the trochaic ‘Nazi lampshade’ (Lady Lazarus, l.5) in the same line highlights, through awkward pronunciation, the incongruity of Plath’s imagery. The identification of her skin as being a Nazi lampshade – allegedly made from the skin of murdered Jews^[45] – is an incredible image of suffering. This taken alongside the surreal image of her face as a ‘featureless, fine/Jew linen’ (Lady Lazarus, l.8,9) means that Plath is materialising her own anguish through these associations with Jewish suffering; as Young states ‘the Holocaust Jew’ became a referent, a ‘public figure for suffering’.^[46] The final line of the poem continues the link with the Jewish figure of suffering. Plath writes ‘And I eat men like air’ (Lady Lazarus, l.84).^[47] Mouths and eating are a recurring motif in Plath’s work symbolising despair.^[48] In this line, eating creates an incongruous and surreal image of interaction between oppressor/oppressed or Nazi/Jew. Kendall also notes how eating is linked to the concentration camp setting where the ‘universe of intense suffering’ equates to the dynamic of ‘eating or being eaten’.^[49] The surreal image of Jewish suffering, of being eaten, equates to Plath’s anguish – she, too, is subject to the sensations of eating or being eaten. In comparison, Celan uses the process of eating the ‘madhouse truffles’ (Landscape, l.5) to allude to the insanity of the Holocaust and thereby articulate his anguish.

     As evidenced in Celan’s ‘The Straitening’ repetition creates a sense of anguish through repeating those images associated with death. In Plath’s poem ‘Getting There’ she similarly uses repetition to create a sense of emotional anguish through imagery associated with death. Kendall states that repetition in Plath’s work serves to ‘heighten intensity’ and that ‘repetition betrays the psychological state’ of the narrator.^[50]  Like Celan, who opens ‘The Straitening’ with a sense of anguish, analogised by the terrain’s asunder, Plath also opens her poem presenting the condition of anguish. The contrast between them, however, is that Celan reifies his anguish through the physical setting whereas Plath begins her portrayal internalised in the narrator’s psyche. The repetitious opening of ‘How far is it?/How far is it now?’ (Getting There, l.1,2)^[51] establishes Plath’s unease as she is unable to comprehend both her location and the final point of her journey. These lines recur in the poem twice more (Getting There, l.34,43), acting as an identifier of increasing anguish. Developing this psychological state is the narrator’s circumstances. In contrast to Celan’s interchangeable nowhere and nighttime theme to explore the condition of death, Plath returns to, and aggrandises with each repetition, the site of the train – carrying her towards death. Again, the preoccupation with death is synonymous with Plath’s emotional state. The train is referred to in the following ways: ‘the train is steaming/Steaming and breathing’ (Getting There, l.38,39), ‘The train is dragging itself, it is screaming’ (Getting There, l.55) and it is repetitiously described in animalistic terms as ‘The gigantic gorilla interior’ (Getting There, l.3) and as an ‘Animal/Insane for the destination’ (Getting There, l.56,57).^[52] The disyllabic ‘steaming’, ‘breathing’, and ‘screaming’ mimic the rhythm and sounds of a train moving along the track and the personification of it into an insane animal emphasises its drive and focus on the destination of death. Death is conceptualised through Plath’s repetition of the pronoun ‘I’. The ‘I’ reveals most the condition of anguish. For example, Plath writes ‘and I in agony/I cannot undo myself’ (Getting There, l.37,38).^[53] Here she presents the intangible cognition of approaching the destination of death. Later, however, Plath provides the tangible engagement with death: ‘I shall bury the wounded . . . I shall count and bury the dead’ (Getting There, l.60,61).^[54] Repetition then functions to not only intensify emotional anguish, but also to express Plath’s preoccupation with death. Plath’s psyche and engagement within the setting of death are represented by the iterations of the train and the recurring use of the pronoun.

     In the way that Celan problematises language which results in a world without language in ‘To Stand’, Plath similarly presents the failings of language and communication. Failed communication indicates anguish and connects to the theme of death; however, it is not her own death but her father’s. The first two lines of the second stanza link these two themes:

‘Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time’. (Daddy, l.6,7)^[55]

Language fails to provide a logical, communicative function in these lines: the sequential inconsistency of Plath figuratively killing her father when he had already died prefigures the more explicit rendering of communicative failure in the following lines:

‘I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,’ (Daddy, l.24-27)^[56]

Plath emphasises the emotional anguish surrounding the relationship with her father through the fact that she could not speak to him. The lack of communication indicates the extent of the breakdown between them and further expresses her psychological stasis and, therefore, anguish, as that communication with her father is no longer possible. Pronunciation of language is inhibited emphatically by the ‘barb wire snare’ reducing it to the obscured ‘ich’ (Daddy, l.26-27). The repetition of this sound confirms Plath’s failed attempts at communication. The caesura in the line of the repeated ‘ich’ focusses the failure of language as it requires the reader to pause and consider the effect of Plath’s inability to enunciate before receiving the proclamation of language’s ultimate malfunction: ‘I could hardly speak’ and when she did ‘the language’ was ‘obscene’ (Daddy, l.28,30).^[57] Plath’s poem underscores the precarious nature of language as an effective communicator. Like Celan, Plath presents the reader with the devolution of language: she uses it, firstly, to detail the sequential incongruity surrounding her father’s death; secondly, to consider the difficulty of using language to communicate; and, finally, she focusses language’s breakdown through the repeated enunciation of ‘ich’. The failure of language with reference to communicating with her father exposes Plath’s preoccupation with death and presents a supreme state of anguish.

     This study has considered the ways in which Celan and Plath represent emotional anguish in their poetry. The themes of Holocaust representation and death have offered the opportunity to analyse how they express their psychological anguish. Their depictions of the nightmarish landscape and their relationship with language have provided a focus of interpretation. Holocaust representation is linked to emotional anguish in both poets’ building of the nightmarish landscape. The study has established similarities in the way that Celan and Plath use Holocaust imagery to convey emotional anguish: Holocaust setting, images of Jewish suffering, and symbolism feature in both poets’ articulation. Language has also been an important aspect in interpreting emotional anguish through Holocaust representation. The poets’ use of language has enabled them to demonstrate a feeling of anguish. It has been shown that both use incongruous and surreal imagery, and Holocaust iconography to represent their anguished states. Whilst there are nuances to their representation, the important point is that Holocaust imagery, either through the nightmare landscape or use of language, has been utilised by both to articulate emotional anguish.

     Looking at the theme of death has enabled a broader understanding of their psychological states. This study has shown that the poets’ preoccupation with death has been reified by the nightmarish landscape. Celan’s world of dying and Plath’s destruction of the individual are characterised by images associated with death and provide a thematic link between them. The eye, also a strong link, features in their portrayal of death. For both, it provides a transitional means from the temporal world to the world of death. The nightmarish landscape contextualised by the theme of death indicates a conclusive representation of their emotional anguish. To return to the assessment of language with a focus on the theme of death, repetition, and the failings of language were analysed to develop the understanding of emotional anguish in their work. Repetitious questions, phrases, imagery, and descriptions have occurred in both poets’ writing – serving to illustrate and magnify the representation of emotional anguish. The poets’ exploration of the failings of language continues the theme of death. Although there are subtle differences between the poets, for example, Celan emphasises paradox and obfuscates meaning and Plath uses sequential inconsistency and communicative failure, both explore the condition where language has failed to the extent that it no longer serves a function for the poets. This locates it to the theme of death because, for Celan, he considers his life without it which is akin to the condition of death as language is inextricably linked to poetic expression and, for Plath, her inability to communicate with her father highlights his death and, consequently, death as a theme in her work. Whilst there are differing reasons for why the poets depict this relationship with language, the main concern of the study is to demonstrate that both identify the failure of language to define emotional anguish.

     The study of emotional anguish in the poetry of Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath has established comparisons in the ways that they incorporate the themes of Holocaust representation and death to articulate their psychological states. Using the components of the nightmarish landscape and the analysis of language has focused the interpretation of emotional anguish and developed the comparisons between them.

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Bibliography

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Young, J. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990)

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^[1] Paul Celan, Selected Poems, translator Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1996), p.21.

^[2] Antony Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2005), p.49.

^[3] James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990), p.125.

^[4] Young, Writing and Rewriting, p.120.

^[5] Young, Writing and Rewriting, p.120.

^[6] Clarise Samuels, Holocaust Visions: Surrealism and Existentialism in the Poetry of Paul Celan, (Columbia, SC: Camden House, INC., 1993), p.6.

^[7] Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, p.31.

^[8] Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, p.48.

^[9] Carole Stone, ‘Black Statements: Sylvia Plath’s “Little Fugue” and Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”’ (2003).

^[10] Samuels, Holocaust Visions, p.124.

^[11] Celan, Selected Poems, p.63.

^[12] Celan, Selected Poems, p.63.

^[13] Celan, Selected Poems, p.123.

^[14] Celan, Selected Poems, p.123.

^[15] Celan, Selected Poems, p.123.

^[16] Samuels, Holocaust Visions, p.69.

^[17] Celan, Selected Poems, p.123.

^[18] Samuels, Holocaust Visions, p.60.

^[19] Tim Kendall, Sylvia Plath A Critical Study, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2001), p.127.

^[20] Sylvia Plath, Ariel, (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1965), p.55.

^[21] Young, Writing and Rewriting, p.123.

^[22] Young, Writing and Rewriting, p.128.

^[23] Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p.174.

^[24] Plath, Ariel, p.55,56.

^[25] Plath, Ariel, p.36.

^[26] Plath, Ariel, p.36.

^[27] Plath, Ariel, p.37.

^[28] Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p.37.

^[29] Alejandro A. Vallega, Sense and Finitude Encounters at the Limits of Language, Art, and the Political, (New York: State University of New York Press, Albany, 2009), p.87.

^[30] Celan, Selected Poems, p.251.

^[31] Samuels, Holocaust Visions, p.96.

^[32] Samuels, Holocaust Visions, p.96.

^[33] Celan, Selected Poems, p.25.

^[34] Celan, Selected Poems, p.141.

^[35] Celan, Selected Poems, p.153.

^[36] Samuels, Holocaust Visions, p.60.

^[37] Celan, Selected Poems, p.141.

^[38] Celan, Selected Poems, p.141.

^[39] Celan, Selected Poems, p.141.

^[40] Celan, Selected Poems, p.143.

^[41] Celan, Selected Poems, p.149.

^[42] Celan, Selected Poems, p.145.

^[43] Celan, Selected Poems, p.233.

^[44] Plath, Ariel, p.16.

^[45] Rowland, Holocaust Poetry, p.44.

^[46] Young, Writing and Rewriting, p.120.

^[47] Plath, Ariel, p.19.

^[48] Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p.117.

^[49] Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p.122.

^[50] Kendall, Sylvia Plath, p.149.

^[51] Plath, Ariel, p.43.

^[52] Plath, Ariel, p.43,44.

^[53] Plath, Ariel, p.44.

^[54] Plath, Ariel, p.44.

^[55] Plath, Ariel, p.54.

^[56] Plath, Ariel, p.54.

^[57] Plath, Ariel, p.54.