Christopher Reid
's selection of Ted Hughes's letters has now revealed that after her death Hughes wrote: She asked me for help, as she so often has. I was the only person who could have...
Friends, Associates
Sylvia Plath
Al Alvarez
, a friend and literary editor at the Observer, described the couple in their new surroundings: Hughes was in command . . . Sylvia seemed effaced, the poet taking a back seat...
Literary responses
Sylvia Plath
Critic Eileen Aird
sees the poems of The Colossus as indicat[ing] a consciousness of herself as a poet, a craftsman, which is absorbed and transcended in the later work.
Aird, Eileen M. Sylvia Plath. Oliver and Boyd, 1973.
17
In his Observer review, Al Alvarez
Literary responses
Sylvia Plath
In an obituary in the Observer on 17 February, Al Alvarez
(who later made extensive use of Plath in his study of suicide) called her the most gifted woman poet of our time ....
Literary responses
Patricia Beer
Though Robert Lowell
praised the poems in this volume, its reception marked a downturn in PB
's reception. Some established male poets—Alan Brownjohn
, Al Alvarez
—blamed her for being too crafted, too careful...