Notes to a Neophyte
Notes to a Neophyte - fact Summary
Written at Smith College
Believed to date from Plath's Smith College years, this short didactic poem reads as advice to an aspiring writer. It urges transforming ordinary, “mumble” language through rigorous structure and paradox, using metaphors of heat, ice and geological time to show how pressure and craft turn common words into something hard and lasting. The college context frames it as an early lesson in artistic discipline.
Read Complete AnalysesTake the general mumble, blunt as the faceless gut of an anonymous clam, vernacular as the strut of a slug or a small preamble by snail under hump of home: metamorphose the mollusk of vague vocabulary with the structural discipline: stiffen the ordinary malleable mask to the granite grin of bone. For such a tempering task, heat furnace of paradox in an artifice of ice; make love and logic mix, and remember, if tedious risk seems to jeopardize this: it was a solar turbine gace molten earth a frame and it took the diamond stone a weight of world and time being crystallized from carbon to the hardest substance known.
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