Al Alvarez

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...

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...

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...

Sitwell was subject to dismissive antifeminist comment from such critics as Geoffrey Grigson and Harold Acton . The poets of the Movement were famously dismissive of ES . Al Alvarez published a notorious and...

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. In his Observer review, Al Alvarez

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 ....

EJ published The Mind Has Mountains, a group of poems about her fairly recent mental breakdown and time spent in a mental hospital.