Pictured: Nazi leader, Hermann Goering
Plath’s journals and calendars reveal that she attended a bullfight in Spain where she witnessed the picador gored by the bull. This of course was the first inspiration for the poem. But Plath had by now become adept in her multiple meanings.
In 1956, two important books came out about Nazi leader Hermann Goering, whose name was also spelled “Goring”: Instrument of Tyranny, by Edward Crankshaw (a regular writer for The Atlantic Monthly), and Hermann Goring, Charles Henry Bewley’s biography. The latter quoted the Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief, saying, “My measures will not be crippled by any bureaucracy. Here I don’t have to worry about Justice; my mission is only to destroy and to exterminate; nothing more.” This commander holds the same intention as the Spanish picador.
Between 1950 and 1958, nine major movies or television series were also about or prominently featured Hermann Goering. In reading Plath’s poem, “The Goring,” and understanding Goering’s penchant for artwork, his formal dress, his physical obesity and hunger for death, the poem is a fine metaphor for the bullfighting that she and Hughes witnessed. In her 1958 journals, Plath related bullfighting and Nazi blood-thirst the following year, as she wrote of reading a borrowed book on being a World War II conscientious objector, The Unfinished Man by James Byrom (Chatto & Windus, London , 1957) (UJ, 343).