Sylvia Plath

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Standard Name: Plath, Sylvia
Birth Name: Sylvia Plath
Married Name: Sylvia Hughes
SP was primarily a poet, and most famously a confessional poet, although she also wrote a novel, a radio play, short stories and a book for children. She is best known for the poems she wrote in the last eighteen months that she lived. Her life story, complete with her suicide at the age of thirty, tends to overshadow her literary achievement, although critics of recent decades have made strides towards preserving her literary contribution and promoting its value.
Black-and-white photo portrait of Sylvia Plath, looking directly at the camera and seated in front of bookshelves.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Production Ketaki Kushari Dyson
For this column she reviewed authors such as Sylvia Plath , D. H. Lawrence , Thom Gunn , Ted Hughes , Cesare Pavese , Eugene Ionesco , Simone de Beauvoir , Jorge Luis Borges ,...
Textual Production Anne Stevenson
During her first marriage AS tried to write a novel, but found (like Sylvia Plath 's heroine in The Bell Jar) that she had nothing to say.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
10
It was Donald Hall , she...
Textual Production Tillie Olsen
TO 's dazzling performance as a Communist speaker was the first phase of a career that led towards her later years as a star literary lecturer. As a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute she spoke...
Textual Production Anne Stevenson
AS retains her belief in poetry's need and capacity to reach out to elusive reality, to the ahuman, wordless world.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
173
qtd. in
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
170-1
She keeps an Ongoing Anthology, a loose-leaf folder with copies of...
Textual Features Jennifer Dawson
The title (not the one under which it was first submitted) strikingly anticipates that of Sylvia Plath 's The Bell Jar, 1963, with its image of an invisible barrier separating the protagonist from the...
Textual Features Anne Sexton
AS took the title for this volume from the novel Herzog, by Saul Bellow , whose writing she deeply admired: Live or die, but don't poison everything.
qtd. in
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
162
Its contents included Sylvia 's Death...
Textual Features Judith Kazantzis
The errant unicorn that she struggles to ride is the poetic impulse, and she says she entertains incompatible wishes: to ride it hard towards social goals, but also not to be labelled or compelled along...
Textual Features Michèle Roberts
The contents of this volume span a range of genres and moods. poems about places or natural objects observe with precision; love poems are often ambivalent: won't you make my blood / jump? won't you...
Textual Features Gillian Allnutt
In the The Talking PrincessGA grapples with the challenges of finding and asserting the female voice: I woke / and begged one question of my adoring prince. / Would he accord my dream...
Textual Features Alexander Pope
The play is remarkable among its other fun for a minor characater, Phoebe Clinket, an unhinged woman poet. She was wrongly identified in Edward Parker 's Key as Anne Finch , a mistake which has...
Textual Features Gillian Allnutt
In the poemWhy NotGA ponders the relationship between women's writing, the ambiguity of language, and the seduction of suicide. The speaker (presumably GA ) imaginatively places herself in the subject-position of Virginia Woolf
Textual Features Germaine Greer
Women are a minority here, but well represented: Fleur Adcock , Anna Letitia Barbauld , Amy Clampitt , Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas) , Emily Dickinson , Freda Downie , U. A. Fanthorpe , Vicki Feaver
Textual Features Anne Stevenson
Many of these poems are occasional. Journal Entry: Ward's Island, inscribed to Lauris Edmond , recalls minus-eighteen-degree weather on the last day of a poetry festival in Toronto in February 1989. (AS describes...
Textual Features Seamus Heaney
These pieces cover elders and friends (Larkin , Walcott , Patrick Kavanagh ), poets of Eastern Europe where poetry performs the service of resistance to political oppression (as it might do in Northern Ireland...
Textual Features Leonora Carrington
LC 's text adapts the story of Judith and Holofernes and includes several more characters whose names also come from the Bible version. In addition to the widow Judith, it features her father, Issachar (in...

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