Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath

A fan of the exuberant actress Keira Knightley, I have been paying attention to upcoming films of hers. Since I do not live in a big city like New York or Los Angeles, it looks like that I will have to wait until it gets onto DVD to see her in the independent film “The Edge of Love”, in which she plays one of the two feisty and free-spirited women united by the brilliant poet Dylan Thomas, who loved them both. With Sienna Miller playing Dylan Thomas’ wife Caitlin McNamara, Keira Knightley played his lover Vera Phillips. It is well-known that Dylan Thomas was an alcoholic, and may have drunk himself to death at the early age of 39.

Just earlier this week, I read about the tragic suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of the American poet Sylvia Plath with her husband, the former Poet Laureate of England, Ted Hughes. The tumultuous marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has been discussed for decades, and even made into a movie. – I must add that that movie has remained one of the few in which the actors were actually less attractive than the real-life characters they played. Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes looked rather “small” that one would wonder how he could have seduced all these women in his life, and Gwyneth Paltrow was so vapid that one could hardly reconcile such a bland character with the violent and visceral poetry written by Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of 30 by putting her head in a gas oven, after Ted Hughes left her for another woman Assia Wevill. After her death, the feminist movement made her a martyr and portrayed her exclusively as a victim of Ted Hughes’, ignoring the fact that Sylvia Plath did suffer from depression periodically all her life. Six years after Plath’s suicide, Assia Wevill committed suicide by gassing herself as well. The only difference is that she not only killed herself, she also killed the four-year old daughter she had with Ted Hughes. A poet that drove two women to their suicide certainly could not have been normal himself, but at least until his death, Ted Hughes never had any mental breakdowns. Perhaps his insanity lay in the very fact that he remained unfazed and unchanged on the surface, even though ordinary men in his position would have been rendered distraught by the dramatic actions taken by these women.

We all have heard the theory that there may be a link between manic depression and genius. After all, even in business, we say that a very fine line exists between vision and lunacy! Historically, so many artists, writers, musicians and poets were known to have suffered from depression. Perhaps it is true that unless one can feel orders of magnitude stronger than average people, he/she will not be able to command the imagination for the right words, the right image or the right melody to express the intensity of that feeling. Genius is by definition out of the norm, and to reach an extreme, I suppose one must be at an extreme. Nicholas Hughes’ suicide perhaps serves as a rebuttal to the ultra-feminists. Although Ted Hughes did play a significant role in Sylvia Plath’s and Assia Wevill’s suicides by abandoning them and cheating on them, Sylvia Plath was first and foremost a victim of the mental illness which killed her mortally, but immortalized her as well through her powerful, violent and unique poetry.

Likewise, Dylan Thomas’ alcohol addiction probably killed him prematurely, but who knows whether he could have been able to write such profound poetry were he completely sober and sane, like the rest of us ordinary people, who spend most of our time thinking practically and logically about jobs, kids, houses and mortgages? We are never compelled to contemplate the eternal continuity of life in nature, as he did in one of his most famous poems –

“And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.”

There is no question that one career path I will discourage my son from pursuing is that of a poet – it seems that one is either an awful poet, or a dead poet.