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
Occupation Frances Horovitz
Patrick Magee , Harvey Hall , Stevie Smith , Hugh Dickson , and Basil Jones were the other readers for the project. The poets from whose work they read included W. B. Yeats , D. H. Lawrence
politics Margaret Drabble
She also remembered the rise of feminism: the books by Doris Lessing , Sylvia Plath , Nell Dunn , and Edna O'Brienthat would irreversibly affect women's destiny, and the pioneering of feminist journalism by Mary Stott .
Drabble, Margaret. “1960s”. The Guardian, 26 May 2007, pp. Weekend 25 - 31.
28
Publishing Ruth Fainlight
RF wrote an essay about her friends Jane Bowles and Sylvia Plath , which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and was reprinted in Crossroads, the journal of the American Poetry Society . Another...
Publishing Seamus Heaney
For the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sylvia Plath 's death, SH wrote a critical response to her poetry, The indefatigable hoof-taps (titled from Plath's poem Words), which was published this day in the TLS...
Publishing Zoë Fairbairns
Between her first and her second novel, ZF wrote a feminist updating of the myth of Iphigenia, only to have it rejected by Macmillan .
Fairbairns, Zoë et al., editors. More Tales I Tell My Mother. Journeyman, 1987.
164-5
She was deeply upset by this, and not consoled...
Reception Ruth Fainlight
RF has drawn appreciative comment from fellow poets and writers like Helen Dunmore , A. S. Byatt , and Elaine Feinstein (who has written that in a time when every poet is wooed by the...
Reception Julia Ward Howe
Elaine Showalter 's biography, The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe, 2016, claimed that Howe possessed the subversive intellect of an Emily Dickinson , the political and philosophical interests of an Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Residence Fleur Adcock
FA , re-migrating as an adult from New Zealand to London, arrived there a week after the suicide of Sylvia Plath .
Vincent, Sally. “Final touch”. Guardian Unlimited, 29 July 2000.
Adcock, Fleur. Poems: 1960-2000. Bloodaxe Books, 2000.
final page
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 Seamus Heaney
The Rattle Bag, arranged not by date, or theme, or even alphabetically by author, but alphabetically by title, aims at and achieves a happy and fertile randomness, gathering chips of brilliance from all times...
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...
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...

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