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
Literary responses Felicia Hemans
FH remained continuously in print throughout the Victorian period, but her critical reputation and popularity waned before its close and died with modernism. She lingered on in popular memory as the author of popular recitation...
Literary responses Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan , however, applies a withering pen to WC in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Literary responses Anne Sexton
Like To Bedlam and Part Way Back before it, this was nominated for the National Book Award but did not in the end win. It brought Sexton, however, the award of a travelling scholarship from...
Literary responses P. L. Travers
Sylvia Plath spoke a great deal about Mary Poppins, calling her the fairy godmother of her childhood.
Lawson, Valerie. Mary Poppins She Wrote. The Life of P. L. Travers, London: Aurum Press 2005. Aurum Press, 2005.
xi
Literary responses Anne Sexton
British reviews were mostly scathing. Despite some respectful notices, the tendency was to see Sexton as a weaker version of the confessional aspects of Sylvia Plath .
Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
364
Literary responses Laura Riding
This broadcast brought a notable poetic response. Sylvia Plath wrote a poem, Little Fugue, which she annotated, on listening to Laura Riding.
qtd. in
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
400
Robert Nye soon afterwards sent a copy of his first publication...
Literary responses Elizabeth Bishop
Sylvia Plath , who began with negative comments about EB , later developed admiration for her fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore who is her godmother.
qtd. in
Rees-Jones, Deryn. “Writing ELIZABETH”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, 2002, pp. 42-62.
44
Fleur Adcock notes...
Intertextuality and Influence Brigid Brophy
One of the twelve sections is no more fifty words. The novel's decadent style inhabits the minds of several characters, particularly that of the tall, fragile, perpetually exhausted but secretly sexually voracious Antonia Mount. Her...
Intertextuality and Influence Gillian Clarke
Her volume opens with a poem, Baby Sitting, which voices a guilty unwillingness to respond to a child's demands; M. Wynn Thomas thinks this a response to the angrier, rawer Morning Song which opens...
Intertextuality and Influence Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In 1951, however, the poet Louise Bogan set out to recuperate her as the founder of a whole feminine school of rather daring verse on the subject of feminine and masculine emotions.
qtd. in
Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. University of Texas Press, 1977.
144
Emily Stipes Watts
Intertextuality and Influence Judith Kazantzis
JK began writing at the age of seven.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
She wrote steadily until she was twenty-one, then produced only about seven more poems until, in the early 1970s, she discovered both the women's movement and the...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Ann Duffy
The book was highly derivative. Though she had just discovered the poems of Pablo Neruda , CAD describes the contents of the volume as a mixture of Keats and Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas and...
Intertextuality and Influence Deborah Levy
This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna St Vincent Millay
Thomas Hardy (as reported by Elinor Wylie ) is believed to have said her poems were one of the only two great things in the United States, the other being the skyscraper.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
xiii, 290
To...
Intertextuality and Influence Ann Oakley
The authors use as epigraph a passage from Sylvia Plath 's Three Women: a Poem for Three Voices.
Oakley, Ann et al. Miscarriage. Fontana, 1984.
9
They then begin with some shocking statistics. Nobody knows what proportion miscarriages bear to live...

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