british holocaust poetry: songs of experience other speech possible. This is not to be undervalued.’ Furthermore, in Keren’s
opinion,few authentic Holocaust testimonies qualify as ‘Art’, capable of achieving
more than ‘mere history’ by moving readers to relate emotionally to evidence of
the ghettos, cattle-trucks, and camps as Plath’s highly dramatic poetry does.
Susan Gubar side-stepped the issues of either Jewish or feminist identity politics
in her appraisal of just what has been achieved by ‘Plath’s adaptation of the voices of
the imagined, absent dead’, pointing out that this rhetorical device of prosopopoeia
(or impersonation) has been widely used in ‘some of the most powerful poems
about the Shoah’. Gubar argues that this tactic allows authors such as Nelly Sachs
‘to conceive of subjectivity enduring beyond the concentration camp, and thereby
to suggest that the anguish of the Shoah does not, and will not, dissipate’.^47 Gubar
points out that in anglophone poetry this representation of a dead voice is a double
conjuring trick, since English was one of the few European languages not spoken
on the trains chuffing off to Auschwitz. What she does not say is that Plath’s voice
in ‘Daddy’and ‘Lady Lazarus’ is a shriek of vengeance, reminding blood-sucking
torturers and murderers that social retribution awaits them, as indeed it did at
the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, and prophesying (through her allusion to
Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’—‘Beware, beware’^48 ) that they will also be condemned
through art, which they cannot ultimately destroy. This, of course, is demonstrated
as true every time Plath’s poetry is read. It expresses not only an undissipated
anguish, but a mythological, self-replenishing fury.^49
Plath wrote two further poems informed by Holocaust imagery: ‘Mary’s Song’
and ‘Getting There’. In the first, a young mother, like Plath herself, identifies with
Mary, Mother of the Lamb of God, to envisage the holocaustal fate in store for her
child. In the second, the poem’s persona endures a long, nightmarish journey that
impels her across Europe to an unknown destination. Using the driven experience
of a woman in labour, Plath constructs an apparent allegory for poetic creation
during the bewildering onrush of twentieth-century history which gave birth to her
as a new poet. Gubar persuasively interprets ‘Getting There’ through the lens of
the forced deportations by cattle train and death marches that translated the Nazis’
prisoners to the new universe of the camps, where they arrived stripped of their
old identity. Tim Kendall disagrees that ‘Getting There’ is a Holocaust poem: ‘The
subject of the poem is holocaust in general, not one particular holocaust.’^50 Yet in
a critical study devoted to Plath he sympathetically explores her use of Holocaust
(^47) Susan Gubar, ‘Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and her Contempor-
aries’,Yale Journal of Criticism, 14/1 (2001), 192.
(^48) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, inSamuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 103.
(^49) The continued emphasis on the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors tends to obscure
their heroic resistance (e.g. in the Warsaw Ghetto) and their retaliation once they had the chance;
see e.g. the photos taken by Lee Miller at the Liberation of Dachau of the guards beaten up by the
prisoners. 50
Kendall,Sylvia Plath, 177.