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Sylvia Plath

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

This chapter analyzes the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It notes her tendency to figure or literalise the dominant critical metaphors of the time — a tendency evident in her contemporaries but is ... More

This chapter analyzes the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It notes her tendency to figure or literalise the dominant critical metaphors of the time — a tendency evident in her contemporaries but is particularly pronounced in Plath. Moreover, this tendency applies even to such a seemingly abstract concept as poetic impersonality, a concept which can easily be depicted in terms of Laingian depersonalisation. With the simplifying wrong-way telescope of hindsight, Plath could be said to have moved from a paradigm of poetic impersonality to a personalised aesthetic of confessionalism or extremism. But in fact many of the intriguing and valuable tensions in her later work proceed from how she is attempting to make use of the material of the latter while still evincing considerable attachment both to the paradigm of the former and to the fashion for the dramatic soliloquy and dramatic monologue, a mode to which she kept returning, even in the last poems of 1963.Less

Introduction

Luke Ferretter

in Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study

The introduction gives a chronological survey of Plath's fiction, published and unpublished. It divides her short stories into the following chronological groups – 1: Juvenilia (1946–50). 2: College ... More

The introduction gives a chronological survey of Plath's fiction, published and unpublished. It divides her short stories into the following chronological groups – 1: Juvenilia (1946–50). 2: College Stories to 1953 (1950–53). 3: College Stories (1954–55). 4: Cambridge Stories (1956–57) 5: Boston and Yaddo (1958–59). 6: British Women's Stories (1960–62). The composition and publication details of each story are established here, often for the first time, as well as some of the major plot details. Next, the introduction provides a similar account of all three novels on which Plath worked: Falcon Yard, based on her Cambridge experience; The Bell Jar; and the novel she left unfinished at her death, Double Exposure.Less

Elegies of Form in Bishop, Plath, Stevenson: Warton Lecture on English Poetry

Angela Leighton

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 121, 2002 Lectures

This lecture discusses form, which is a term that has multiform meanings and is contradictory. It looks at the sense of form found in the works of Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Stevenson. ... More

This lecture discusses form, which is a term that has multiform meanings and is contradictory. It looks at the sense of form found in the works of Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Stevenson. Form is not simply as a matter of formal technique, but as an object in a tradition that goes back to Victorian aestheticism's playful commodifications of its own formal pleasures. It states that the sense of elegy may be greater or lesser, depending on the poem.Less

“Two Sweet Ladies”: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s Friendship and Mutual Influence

David Trinidad

in This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton

‘“Two Sweet Ladies”: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s Friendship and Mutual Influence’ explores the friendship between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and their mutual influence on each other’s work. ... More

‘“Two Sweet Ladies”: Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s Friendship and Mutual Influence’ explores the friendship between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and their mutual influence on each other’s work. Poems, letters, and journal entries will be used to trace Sexton and Plath’s meeting in Robert Lowell’s poetry workshop at Boston University in 1959, Sexton’s influence on Plath’s Ariel poems, and conversely, Plath’s influence on Sexton’s poetry after her suicide.Less

Sylvia Plath and ‘The Blessed Glossy New Yorker’

Linda Freedman

in Writing for The New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical

This chapter examines the making of Sylvia Plath in the context of The New Yorker, as well as her sense of her own materiality, or immateriality, as a writer in that context. In Jacqueline Rose's ... More

This chapter examines the making of Sylvia Plath in the context of The New Yorker, as well as her sense of her own materiality, or immateriality, as a writer in that context. In Jacqueline Rose's positioning of Plath in the terrain of contemporary periodicals, The New Yorker figures as the most desirable destination for her writing, even though her work appears more frequently in other periodicals such as the Ladies' Home Journal, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. Rose points out that Plath published in a range of magazines with quite different markets. She went for highbrow and middlebrow, literary and popular, with exposure as her overriding concern. The New Yorker's initial reluctance to publish Plath made acceptance in its pages all the more attractive.Less

Mothers, Mirrors, Doubles: Anne Stevenson's Elegies for Sylvia Plath

Adam Piette

in Voyages over Voices: Critical Essays on Anne Stevenson

This chapter examines the melancholic poem titled ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’ written by poet Anne Stevenson and published in 1988. Elegies or mournful poems are commonly written by poets to pose ... More

This chapter examines the melancholic poem titled ‘Letter to Sylvia Plath’ written by poet Anne Stevenson and published in 1988. Elegies or mournful poems are commonly written by poets to pose rhetorical questions related to the afterlife and the passage of the soul beyond death. Unlike other elegies, the poem looks at the conventional practices associated with pastoral elegy with its interesting natural forces such as willows and springs. One of the criticisms raised against the poem is its weak elegiac gesture due to the short biography of characters in the fiction. The poem's biographical failure is primarily caused by the use of interrelated ideas, including the different social depictions of maternal imago and the challenges associated with becoming famous.Less

Going to Extremes

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

This chapter first considers A. Alvarez's assessment of the poetry and suicide of Sylvia Plath. It argues that Plath's suicide was an eventuality neither Alvarez's theories, nor Alvarez himself had ... More

This chapter first considers A. Alvarez's assessment of the poetry and suicide of Sylvia Plath. It argues that Plath's suicide was an eventuality neither Alvarez's theories, nor Alvarez himself had predicted when he first admired Plath's work, but was something with which they had to come to terms. Alvarez's criticism changed in order to account for the unmistakably thanatopic themes in Plath's extraordinary last bursts of creativity and for their possible connection to the death of the author herself. The chapter then turns to Alvarez's extremism. For him, ‘extremism in the arts ends not so much in anarchy as in a kind of internal fascism by which the artist, to relieve his own boredom, becomes both torturer and tortured’. It is ‘ruthless, destructive, deeply self-involved, wildly self-gratifying’. By this Alvarez was advocating a stripe of Western art that, set beside his descriptions of the poetry of Eastern Europe, appears morbidly decadent.Less

Threshold: Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath

Marta Figlerowicz

in Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature

The first chapter, “Threshold,” examines the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath. Stevens’ and Plath’s poems stall in realizations that a person’s mind and body do not themselves, even upon ... More

The first chapter, “Threshold,” examines the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath. Stevens’ and Plath’s poems stall in realizations that a person’s mind and body do not themselves, even upon reflection, provide her with sufficient clues about the content and causes of the affects that move them. These poems’ speakers try, and fail, to imagine or conjure into being an audience held captive by their self-expression, in whose presence the stakes of this self-expression could clarify. The speakers’ sense of themselves, and of the genre in which they express their feelings, is undone by this inability. To bring out these poems’ broader philosophical implications, the chapter engages with the work of Charles Altieri.Less

1963, London: The Myth of the Artist and the Woman Writer

Patricia Waug

in The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

This chapter takes a look at the myth of the artist, which is an authorial construct considered as problematic and crucial for women writers in 1963, starting with a section on sexual revolution, and ... More

This chapter takes a look at the myth of the artist, which is an authorial construct considered as problematic and crucial for women writers in 1963, starting with a section on sexual revolution, and then moving on to discuss sex in Britain in 1963, which was associated with demise, political corruption and suicide. It also considers the death of Sylvia Plath, and concludes that the constructions of art and the artist and the Good and Goodness are never gender neutral and can never be fully separated.Less

From Prospero to Orpheus

in The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes

This chapter examines Hughes' works and his relationship with Plath. The purpose of all serious poetry is to find a shape and meaning in the chaos of experience. For the whole of his career Hughes ... More

This chapter examines Hughes' works and his relationship with Plath. The purpose of all serious poetry is to find a shape and meaning in the chaos of experience. For the whole of his career Hughes sought appropriate myths, or adaptations or amalgamations of myths, to help him to place his own life in the context of permanent or recurrent experience in a world larger than the merely human.Less

Against Extremism

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

This chapter considers the attacks against Alvarez's extremism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles ... More

This chapter considers the attacks against Alvarez's extremism. In the 1960s and 1970s, there appeared something like a sub-genre devoted to attacking the notion of extremism in verse. Charles Tomlinson's ‘Against Extremity’, from his 1969 collection The Way of the World, was particularly outspoken and unpleasant, referring to how ‘That girl’ who nearly took her own life before writing a book. Roy Fisher, a late modernist poet also declared: ‘The poets are dying because they have been told to die’. The fiercest and most comprehensive sally came from a bright young Scottish academic named Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who inveighed against: the suicide merchants who say in effect, ‘no one can become a great poet unless he has at least tried killing himself’. The chapter goes on to discuss the similarities between Sylvia Plath and Forrest-Thomson, as well as the latter's poetry.Less

Reading as Feeling

Merve Emre

in Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America

Literary ethicists often claim that reading fiction can teach us to feel in deeper, more complex ways toward others. But what are the social and imaginative protocols by which readers enhance and ... More

Literary ethicists often claim that reading fiction can teach us to feel in deeper, more complex ways toward others. But what are the social and imaginative protocols by which readers enhance and express their feelings? This chapter examines how the first American studies scholars in Europe imagined that reading American literature abroad would give rise to an abiding “love between nations” (J. William Fulbright). Drawing on the archives of Fulbright Scholars like Robert Spiller, Alfred Kazin, Sigmund Skard, and F. O. Matthiessen’s memoir From the Heart of Europe, this chapter argues that the affective politics of reading, elaborately enacted by Matthiessen in his attentiveness to his students’ bodily movements in the performance of poetry, helped to consecrate the American literary canon abroad in opposition to New Critical pedagogy at home. Matthiessen thus emerges as a theorist of non-semantic communication whose teachings compliment the speech protocols of the women’s colleges discussed in Chapter One. In turn, the fictions of Matthiessen's students—Sylvia Plath’s sadomasochistic public relations in her short story collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, John Ashbery’s bilingual play in his novel A Nest of Ninnies—expand the communicative possibilities of human beings over and above a shared language.Less

Birthday Letters

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, ... More

This chapter analyzes Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters. Birthday Letters put a poet, now of the 1990s, in correspondence with his younger self and the younger Plath. The poems comment on, allude to, contradict, or compete with those of Plath. There is a certain amount of putting facts right, a settling of scores that relates to the two poets' marriage and to the intrusion of others' biographical speculation about that marriage. Most of the verse in Birthday Letters is technically free, but, like so much mainstream contemporary poetry, it likes to keep the pentameter in sight, and much of it functions at a very low pressure. Indeed, the majority of the book's poems can be read more or less like prose. If the trouble with poetry of the 1960s and 1970s is too much striving for intensity of effect, the problem here is too little. Furthermore, most of the poems' artifice, their particularly poetic features, can, with the exception of some heavy-handed symbolism, be more or less ignored.Less

Lyric: ‘Where's my Snare?’: Eminem and Sylvia Plath: Approach: Psychoanalytic Criticism

Peter Childs

in Texts: Contemporary Cultural Texts and Critical Approaches

Released in 2002, Eminem’s song ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ signals itself as a child’s rebellion in its title by alluding to the common parental demand to clean up private space in the family home and ... More

Released in 2002, Eminem’s song ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ signals itself as a child’s rebellion in its title by alluding to the common parental demand to clean up private space in the family home and using this as a metaphor for emotionally and mentally exorcising past traumas inflicted by the parent. Presented as an image of the repository for the clutter and ‘skeletons’ of the past, the closet is also both the psyche of the singer and a representation of the child’s space in relation to the mother, ultimately the womb. While acknowledging the formal difference between poetry and music lyrics, from a literary perspective it is worth considering how ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ has several facets in common thematically with a poem that has undergone considerable critical analysis: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’. In her guise as confessional poet, Plath has had some direct and indirect influence on popular music. For example, Madonna has named Plath, whom she read as a teenager, as one of her inspirations, and in some respects the lyrics to her songs bear direct comparison with ‘Daddy’, as does Eminem’s.Less

‘The All‐Sustaining Air’: Variations on a Romantic Metaphor

Michael O'Neill

in The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900

The chapter explores the ways in which a metaphor central to Romanticism, that of ‘air’, reappears in the work of 20th-century poets. The metaphor is suggestive because of its multi-faceted ... More

The chapter explores the ways in which a metaphor central to Romanticism, that of ‘air’, reappears in the work of 20th-century poets. The metaphor is suggestive because of its multi-faceted associations. In Hart Crane's ‘The Broken Tower’, the poet is said to allegorise the Romantic tradition as the ‘tribunal monarch of the air’: awe-inspiring but, in the end, not inhibiting Crane's own inspiration. Shelley rhymes ‘air’ with ‘despair’, as if to keep in view the proximity of inspiration and dejection, and subsequent writers such as Wallace Stevens have a comparably double understanding of what Stevens calls ‘the mere air’. For Stevens, who is central to the chapter, the ‘air’ represents a poetic present both different from and imbued by the Romantic. Other post-Romantic poets whose work is discussed include Yeats (responding to Shelley and Wordsworth), Elizabeth Bishop (responding especially to Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hemans), Adrienne Rich (responding to Blake and Wordsworth), and Sylvia Plath (responding to Coleridge). All are seen as sustaining even as they qualify and even interrogate Romanticism.Less

‘I Don’t Like Dramatizing Myself’

William Wootten

in The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter

This chapter considers the poetry of Thom Gunn. While discussing ‘The Gas Poker’ a poem from his last volume, 2000's Boss Cupid, Gunn remarked: ‘I don't like dramatizing myself. I don't want to be ... More

This chapter considers the poetry of Thom Gunn. While discussing ‘The Gas Poker’ a poem from his last volume, 2000's Boss Cupid, Gunn remarked: ‘I don't like dramatizing myself. I don't want to be Sylvia Plath. The last person I want to be!’ The chapter examines the reasons behind this remark. It looks at ‘Expression’, a poem from his 1982 collection The Passages of Joy, suggesting that the lack of expression emanating from its mother and son has its correlative in the lack of direct expression in Gunn's verse of his relationship to his mother and to the manner of her death. Following a surfeit of histrionic emotionalism and suicide in early life, Gunn had little cause to seek it out in art and sought a mentor who would make poetic theory and practice a bulwark against them.Less