“The Disquieting Muses” was among the eight poems Plath wrote in winter and spring of 1958 during a period of inspired creativity.[2][3] Fellow poet and spouse Ted Hughes reported that she was writing as much as 12-hours “at a stretch…too excited to sleep.”[4]
In a note referencing these “eight poems,” Plath exalted at the quality of her recent work:
Literary critic Edward Butscher declared “The Disquieting Muses” the genesis of Plath's “artist self.”[6]
1938 New England hurricane
“The Disquieting Muses” includes a reference to Plath's childhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts when a category 3hurricane struck the area in September 1938: “windows bellied in / like bubbles about to break.” Almost six-years-of-age at the time, Plath retained vivid memories of a storm that killed 564 people and injured 1,700. Winthrope and other communities suffered significant property damage.[7]
Theme
The Disquieting Muses (1916) by Giorgio de Chirico (1947 replica)
The theme and title for the poem is derived from the painting by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico entitled The Disquieting Muses (1918).[8] Reading the poem on a BBC radio programme, Plath explained the significance of the title:
All through the poem, I have in mind the enigmatic figures in this painting—the three terrible faceless dressmaker’s dummies in classical gowns…the dummies suggest a twentieth-century version of other sinister trios of women - the Three Fates, the witches of Macbeth, Thomas De Quincey’s sisters of madness.[9]
Biographer Caroline King Barnard locates the poem's theme in the familiar realm of a daughter's discontents with her upbringing - emphatically directed at her mother.[10]
In each of its seven stanzas Plath registers a malediction. Barnard offers the first of the stanzas in which the disquieting muses appear at “the left side” of the infant daughter's crib:
Mother, mother, what illbred aunt Or what disfigured and unsightly Cousin did you so unwisely keep Unasked to my christening, that she Sent these ladies in her stead With heads like darning-eggs to nod And nod and nod at foot and head And at the left side of my crib?[11][12]
Barnard points out that despite its commonplace theme, familiar to daughters and mothers alike, “the strength of the conviction is not diminished by its lack of uniqueness.”[11]
^Plath, 1981: See Table of Contents p. 6: Editor Ted Hughes places the poem chronologically in 1957. Barnard, 1978 p. 35: Barnard indicates that the poem was written in 1958, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
^Rollyson, 2024 p. 215: “She was in an ecstasy of creation…in a manic, Promethean outpouring.” And p. 218: “...the manic energy that had produced eight good poems…”
^Rollyson, 2024 p. 216: Rollyson does not provide the date nor to whom this note was written.
^Barnard, 1978 p. 53: “...the poet expresses here the familiar you-dont-understand-me theme of nearly every child to a parent, of nearly every daughter to a mother.”
