SOURCE: Lindberg-Seyersted, Brita. “Dramatizations of ‘Visionary Events’ in Sylvia Plath's Poetry.” Studia Neophilologica 68, no. 2 (1996): 205-15.

In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted considers Plath's concerns with clairvoyance and occultism in her life and poetry.

Ted Hughes writes of Sylvia Plath: “The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance and metamorphoses. Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them.”¹ Sylvia Plath herself testified to having had experiences that could not be given a rational, materialistic explanation. Visiting Yeats's Tower at Ballylee in Ireland in September 1962 she “had the uncanny feeling [she] had got in touch with Yeats' spirit,” she wrote.² Once in January 1956, on a visit to Vence in southern France, she had, as she noted in her journal, a “mystic...