19 pages • 38-minute read
Edge
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Crazy Woman” by Gwendolyn Brooks (1960)
In “Edge,” Plath’s speaker portrays the dead woman as a greatly superior being. In “The Crazy Woman,” the 20th-century poet Brooks makes a similar move. Brooks’s speaker, the titular “crazy woman,” stands out because she doesn’t conform. She embraces the disquieting aspects of life by singing in the gloomy atmosphere of November instead of the joyous springtime. While Brooks’s speaker engages with life’s doldrums, she doesn’t romanticize or seek literal death like the woman in Plath’s poem.
“Daddy” by Sylvia Plath (1964)
“Daddy” is one of Plath’s most famous poems. The poem features a woman speaker who kills her oppressive father and husband. Unlike “Edge,” “Daddy,” features a first-person speaker. The woman involved in the violence and the destruction is the “I” narrating the poem. Like the dead woman, the unnamed woman speaker in “Daddy” presents herself as a mythological figure. While “Edge” places the dead woman within the context of tragic Greek heroines and Shakespeare characters, “Daddy” controversially positions the speaker within the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. Plath wasn’t Jewish, and her father, Otto Plath, was a German, but he had no association with Nazism or Nazi Germany.
“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath (1965)
“Lady Lazarus” is another famous poem from Ariel. As with “Daddy,” the poem’s speaker is an unnamed woman. Like “Daddy” and “Edge,” the poem aestheticizes death, turning the act of dying and/or killing into a sophisticated practice. The speaker in “Lady Lazarus” declares that dying is an art form, and it’s a craft at which the speaker is deft. While the dead woman in “Edge” dies once, the woman in “Lady Lazarus,” like the Lazarus in the New Testament, dies and rises again. Both “Edge” and “Lady Lazarus” engage with the motif of objectification. In “Edge,” the speaker turns the dead woman into a coveted object. In “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker highlights her appeal because crowds of peanut crunchers flock to see the spectacle that she creates.
Further Literary Resources
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
The Bell Jar is Plath’s novel, which she initially published in England under the name Victoria Lucas. As with her poems, the work is autobiographical, based on Plath’s time as a guest editor for Mademoiselle when she was 20. The protagonist, Esther Greenwood, experiences a mental health crisis and tries to die by suicide. While “Edge” presents death as a relatively painless ascension to perfection, The Bell Jar details the aftermath of Esther’s suicide attempt, and the vivid imagery isn’t glamorous.
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998)
Hughes published this collection of poems about his relationship with Plath a few months before his death. The timing gives the collection a link to “Edge,” with “Edge” being the last poem Plath wrote before her death by suicide, and Birthday Letters being the final collection Hughes published before he died of a heart attack. Throughout his prolific literary career, Hughes declined to explicitly address his relationship with Plath, so Birthday Letters received much attention and awards. The poems add to Plath’s myth. As with the Greek heroines alluded to in “Edge,” Plath comes across in Birthday Letters as a mystifying figure who can’t seem to untangle herself from her deadly fate.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963 by Sylvia Plath (2018)
The second volume of Plath’s unabridged letters focuses on the final years of her life. They reveal Plath’s intricate emotions as she grapples with the dissolution of her marriage to Hughes and tries to capture literary fame. She worries about the success of The Bell Jar, and she scolds her mother when her mother criticizes the increasingly violent elements of her poems.
Concerning Hughes, Plath is introspective and collapses the polarizing narrative around her and her husband. While Plath regularly excoriates her husband, she also blames herself for turning Hughes into an idol and fastening her identity onto him instead of developing a separate identity on her own.
The book features a preface by Frieda Hughes, who reminds readers that her parents weren’t characters in a literary soap opera but real people, and both had their fair share of flaws.
Listen to Poem
Helen Demetriou reads “Edge” by Sylvia Plath
Listen to the YouTuber and self-proclaimed healer Helen Demetrious read Plath’s poem. Demetriou’s measured tone advances the poem’s precarious atmosphere.
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