William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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
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.
Luke Ferretter
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625093
- eISBN:
- 9780748671694
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625093.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Angela Leighton
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780197263037
- eISBN:
- 9780191734007
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197263037.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
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. ...
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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
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.
David Trinidad
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780813062204
- eISBN:
- 9780813051895
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813062204.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
‘“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. ...
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‘“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
‘“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.
Linda Freedman
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748682492
- eISBN:
- 9781474422109
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748682492.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
Luke Ferretter
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748625093
- eISBN:
- 9780748671694
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748625093.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, ...
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This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar. Most criticism, however, still focuses on her poetry, neglecting this large and significant body of her work. Many of her short stories have never been discussed before. Discussing all her novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society. In each case, Plath's work is set in the cultural context of the discourses and practices of the American 1950s.Less
This is the first study devoted to Sylvia Plath's fiction. Plath wrote fiction throughout her life, in a wide variety of genres, including women's magazine romances, New Yorker stories, comedy, social criticism, autobiography, teenage fiction and science fiction. She wrote novels before and after The Bell Jar. Most criticism, however, still focuses on her poetry, neglecting this large and significant body of her work. Many of her short stories have never been discussed before. Discussing all her novels and stories, and based on research in the three major archives of her work, this book is the complete study of Plath's fiction. The author analyses her influences as a fiction writer, the relationships between her poetry and fiction, the political views she expresses in her fiction, and devotes two chapters to the central concern of her novels and stories, the roles of women in contemporary society. In each case, Plath's work is set in the cultural context of the discourses and practices of the American 1950s.
Adam Piette
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846314841
- eISBN:
- 9781846316272
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846316272.005
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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
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.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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
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.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as ...
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This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.Less
This book is the biography of a taste in poetry and its consequences. During the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of poets appeared who would eschew the restrained manner of Movement poets such as Philip Larkin, a generation who would, in the words of the introduction to A. Alvarez's classic anthology The New Poetry, take poetry ‘Beyond the Gentility Principle’. This was the generation of Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Peter Porter. This book explores what these five poets shared in common, their connections, critical reception, rivalries, and differences, and locates what was new and valuable in their work. The book presents an important re-evaluation of a time when contemporary poetry and its criticism had a cultural weight it has now lost and when a ‘new seriousness’ was to become closely linked to questions of violence, psychic unbalance and, most controversially of all, suicide.
Marta Figlerowicz
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501714221
- eISBN:
- 9781501714245
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501714221.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Patricia Waug
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748620111
- eISBN:
- 9780748651863
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748620111.003.0015
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
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 ...
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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
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.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846310119.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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
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.
Merve Emre
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226473833
- eISBN:
- 9780226474021
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226474021.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
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 ...
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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
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.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0011
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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
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.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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, ...
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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
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.
Keith Sagar
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9781846310119
- eISBN:
- 9781846313479
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846313479
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry ...
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A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. This book probes all aspects of the poet's life and work, delving into the specifics of his life as revealed by his writings and correspondence. A wide array of topics — including the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship between Plath and Hughes, and a detailed analysis of Hughes' poem ‘A Dove Came’ through its evolving drafts — reveals fascinating new avenues of literary and biographical analysis in Hughes' work. Augmenting the rich text in this edition are excerpts of letters from Hughes to the author of this book, a detailed chronology of Hughes' life by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the story ‘Crow’.Less
A literary figure often overshadowed by his famed wife, Sylvia Plath, and their troubled marriage, Ted Hughes was a brilliant poet in his own right who wrote some of the most important British poetry of the twentieth century. This book probes all aspects of the poet's life and work, delving into the specifics of his life as revealed by his writings and correspondence. A wide array of topics — including the mythic imagination, the poetic relationship between Plath and Hughes, and a detailed analysis of Hughes' poem ‘A Dove Came’ through its evolving drafts — reveals fascinating new avenues of literary and biographical analysis in Hughes' work. Augmenting the rich text in this edition are excerpts of letters from Hughes to the author of this book, a detailed chronology of Hughes' life by Ann Skea, and the first publication of the story ‘Crow’.
Peter Childs
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748620432
- eISBN:
- 9780748671700
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748620432.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
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 ...
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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
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.
Michael O'Neill
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199299287
- eISBN:
- 9780191715099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299287.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
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 ...
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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
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.
William Wootten
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781781381632
- eISBN:
- 9781781384893
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781381632.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
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 ...
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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
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.
Arthur Redding
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781604730050
- eISBN:
- 9781604733266
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781604730050.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion ...
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The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism. This book traces the historical contours of this manufactured consent by considering the ways in which authors, playwrights, and directors participated in, responded to, and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses. It argues that a fugitive resistance to the status quo emerged as writers and activists variously fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new spirit of the times. To this end, the author examines work by a wide swath of creators, including essayists W. E. B. Du Bois and F. O. Matthiessen; novelists Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles; playwright Arthur Miller; poet Sylvia Plath; and filmmakers Elia Kazan and John Ford. The book explores how writers and artists created works that went against mainstream notions of liberty, and which offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny. These complex responses and the era they reflect had, and continue to have, profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life, as can be seen in the connections the author makes between past and present.Less
The Cold War was unique in the way films, books, television shows, colleges and universities, and practices of everyday life were enlisted to create American political consensus. This coercion fostered a seemingly hegemonic, nationally unified perspective devoted to spreading a capitalist, socially conservative notion of freedom throughout the world to fight Communism. This book traces the historical contours of this manufactured consent by considering the ways in which authors, playwrights, and directors participated in, responded to, and resisted the construction of Cold War discourses. It argues that a fugitive resistance to the status quo emerged as writers and activists variously fled into exile, went underground, or grudgingly accommodated themselves to the new spirit of the times. To this end, the author examines work by a wide swath of creators, including essayists W. E. B. Du Bois and F. O. Matthiessen; novelists Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles; playwright Arthur Miller; poet Sylvia Plath; and filmmakers Elia Kazan and John Ford. The book explores how writers and artists created works that went against mainstream notions of liberty, and which offered alternatives to the false dichotomy between capitalist freedom and totalitarian tyranny. These complex responses and the era they reflect had, and continue to have, profound effects on American and international cultural and intellectual life, as can be seen in the connections the author makes between past and present.
