Semantic Freedom and the Sense of Freedom: Splendors and Perils of Poetic Madness

This paper gathers a series of reflections on Elena Ciobanu’s monograph regarding Sylvia Plath’s work (Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: The Metamorphoses of the Poetic Self). Beyond the divisions between poetry and linguistics, this reading aims at identifying the added value of the book for Cognitive Sciences, by following the analytical frame proposed by its author, a frame which is discreetly connected to the paradigm of enaction. Based on textual examples from the American poet’s work, three issues are particularly approached: the construction of the self in discourse, the phenomenological unfolding of Plath’s poetic existence and the discursive embodiment that subtends her creativity. Mainly interpretative, the approach attempts to decipher a number of obscure regions of linguistic production in which certain altered states of consciousness find their way into artistic creativity. The paper also tries to identify the (probably major) risk of such semantic adventures that are often outside any intersubjective regulation.