The Colossus and Other Poems

The Colossus and Other Poems Review

The Colossus and Other Poems was published in the United Kingdom in 1960, when Sylvia Plath was twenty-seven; it appeared in the United States two years later. It is the work of a poet who has spent years in rigorous formal training — at Smith College, on a Fulbright at Cambridge, in years of disciplined practice — and who is in full command of that training while not yet in full command of herself. The voice that produced Ariel is here in preparation, not in arrival.

The title poem addresses the figure of the father as a half-buried colossus whose scale cannot be measured and whose voice, try as the speaker might, cannot be heard clearly or reconstructed. The father — Plath’s own father died when she was eight — will become the central figure of the later “Daddy,” approached there with volcanic rage; here he is approached with a different mixture of grief and bewilderment. The comparison illuminates both poems, and the distance between them marks the development of a poet finding her true emotional register.

The collection shows Plath working consciously within the tradition. The influence of Yeats is audible in the rhetoric and ambition of certain poems; Theodore Roethke’s presence is felt in the greenhouse imagery and the attention to small natural phenomena as bearers of psychological meaning. This is not weakness — influence and dialogue with tradition are how poets learn — but it means that the collection has a quality of formal performance that Ariel transcends. Plath is demonstrating, here, that she can do what the tradition requires. In Ariel, she will demonstrate what only she can do.

Among the collection’s finest poems: “Medallion,” “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” and “Mushrooms” — the last of which manages to be ominous, funny, and politically resonant simultaneously, a combination entirely characteristic of Plath’s mature gifts. The Colossus is the necessary preparation for everything that followed.

The Father, Half-Buried

The collection’s presiding figure is the dead father, and it is fascinating to watch Plath approach him here so differently than she will in Ariel. The title poem casts him as a colossal ruined statue the speaker labours endlessly to reconstruct and to hear, crawling over his fragments with a mourner’s hopeless devotion — grief rendered as archaeology rather than rage. The related “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” reaches toward him through his actual vocation: Plath’s own father, Otto, was an entomologist who wrote a scholarly book on bumblebees, and the bee poems that recur throughout her work begin here as a way of touching a man who died when she was eight. Where “Daddy” will later detonate this material into something violent and accusatory, The Colossus handles it with a colder, more controlled bewilderment. The distance between the two treatments is essentially the distance between a brilliant apprentice and a master.

In the Shadow of the Masters

The Colossus is unmistakably the work of a poet still in dialogue with her influences, and Plath makes no secret of it. The rhetorical ambition of W. B. Yeats, the greenhouse imagery and close natural observation of Theodore Roethke, and the verbal music of Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens all leave audible traces. The Roethke resemblance was in fact so pronounced that several poems were dropped from the American edition for fear of appearing derivative. This visible apprenticeship is the collection’s chief limitation read backward from Ariel — at times the performance of mastery is more evident than a wholly individual voice. But it is also the collection’s quiet argument: that the explosive freedom of the later work was built on years of disciplined immersion in the tradition. Plath earned her originality.

Death, Nature, and Formal Control

Thematically, the collection circles obsessively around death, decay, and the natural world as a bearer of psychological meaning. Plath contemplates dead bodies and dead animals, finds menace in landscapes and small creatures, and threads a preoccupation with mortality through poems of otherwise placid surface. What holds it all together is formal command: she works confidently in demanding forms, including terza rima, and her control of sound and line is total. This is the paradox of the book — its emotional content often anticipates the abyss of Ariel, but its formal manner keeps that content carefully contained, as if the poet had not yet given herself permission to let the forms break open. The tension between disciplined surface and turbulent material is precisely what makes the collection so interesting as a document of a poet on the verge.

The Only Book She Saw Published

The Colossus carries a particular poignancy as the sole poetry collection Sylvia Plath published in her lifetime; Ariel and everything else appeared only after her death in 1963. Read on its own terms, it is an accomplished, largely well-reviewed debut by a poet of obvious gifts — British critics greeted its voice as new, strong, and distinctly American. Read in light of what followed, it becomes something more: the essential prologue to one of the twentieth century’s great poetic explosions, the place where the themes, images, and obsessions of Ariel are first assembled in a quieter, more guarded form. For anyone serious about Plath, it is indispensable; for the general reader, it is a rewarding if less incendiary introduction to her art.

The Verdict

The Colossus and Other Poems is essential to understanding Sylvia Plath, and valuable in its own right. It lacks the volcanic immediacy of Ariel — its influences are sometimes too visible, its formal control sometimes holding the material at arm’s length — but its best poems stand independently, and its preoccupations with the lost father, with death, and with the natural world reward close attention. It is the disciplined foundation on which Plath’s later freedom was built, and a reminder that originality in poetry is usually earned through long apprenticeship to the tradition before it is transcended.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Plath before she became Plath: a technically accomplished, formally disciplined debut whose grief, bees, and buried father anticipate the explosion of Ariel.

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