Restoring Sylvia—Reconstructing Sylvia Plath's Ariel
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Ecological Activism and Some of the Poems of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas
Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal Vol.6.Issue 1. 2018 Impact Factor 6.8992 (ICI) http://www.rjelal.com; (Jan-Mar) Email:[email protected] ISSN:2395-2636 (P); 2321-3108(O) RESEARCH ARTICLE ECOLOGICAL ACTIVISM AND SOME OF THE POEMS OF TED HUGHES, SEAMUS HEANEY AND DYLAN THOMAS ARINDAM GHOSH M.A. English, Presently Pursuing Research Under Visva-Bharati ABSTRACT With the rise of ecological branch of literary criticism many critics have attempted to explore the relationship of literature and environment. Consequently the role of literature, and especially poetry is re-examined from ecocentric perspective, that is, poetry is considered as promoting ecological consciousness. Some of the critics eve argue that this consciousness can be converted into activism. To them poetry can be successfully utilized in arresting the present ecological degradation and thus can save the planet from disaster. Here some mid-twentieth century poet, namely Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas are taken and their works are considered as promoting ecological consciousness. Further, some of the poems are thought to have reached to the level of ecological activism. Hughes’ poetry directly addresses the problem of man’s cohabitation with the non-human world. Heaney attempts to establish deeper connection of the individual with the soil. And Thomas’ pantheism is often considered as having deep ecological values. In the context it is also judged if at all poetry can have the seeds for promoting a global ecological movement. Key Words: Ecocriticism, ecological activism, poetry, deep ecology, sense of place, pantheism, eco-poetry . -
"Lady Lazarus" and Lady Chatterley
Plath Profiles 51 "Lady Lazarus" and Lady Chatterley W. K. Buckley, Indiana University Northwest For the October Conference on Plath at IUB, 2012 and Plath Profiles, Volume 5 Supplement, 20121 I. I remember my first reading of Plath, in college, at San Diego State University. We read, of course, all her famous poems from Ariel, as well as "The Jailor" ("I am myself. That is enough"[23]), "The Night Dances" ("So your gestures flake off" [29]). In my youth, on the beaches of Southern California, around a campfire, a group of us read to each other one night the poems of Plath, Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, and D.H. Lawrence—seeing ourselves as prophets against war, despite that a few of us had been drafted to another oil adventure, including me. (Some of our friends had returned with no eyes or feet). We thought such famous poets could change America. They did not. (Despite Shelley's famous proclamation). Plath said in "Getting There": "Legs, arms, piled outside/The tent of unending cries—" (Ariel 57). Same old, same old historical mistakes: America, our 20th Century Roman Empire, we thought then. On the homefront, sexual activity in public places was then, as is now, monitored by our police, given our rape, murder, and "missing women" statistics, first or second in the world for such. Yet on that night, on that particular night, there was something "warmer" in the air on La Jolla Shores, as if we thought the world had calmed down for a moment. When the police arrived at our campfire, we all invited them to take it easy, since we saw ourselves as ordinary people, having ordinary activities in our ordinary bodies. -
Anne Sexton, Her Therapy Tapes, and the Meaning of Privacy
UCLA UCLA Women's Law Journal Title To Bedlam and Part Way Back: Anne Sexton, Her Therapy Tapes, and the Meaning of Privacy Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sn2c9hk Journal UCLA Women's Law Journal, 2(0) Author Lehrich, Tamar R. Publication Date 1992 DOI 10.5070/L321017562 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California TO BEDLAM AND PART WAY BACK: ANNE SEXTON, HER THERAPY TAPES, AND THE MEANING OF PRIVACY Tamar R. Lehrich* INTRODUCTION I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.' The poet Anne Sexton committed suicide in October, 1974, at the age of forty-five. Three months earlier, she had celebrated the 21st birthday of her elder daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, and on that occasion appointed her as Sexton's literary executor. 2 Anne Sexton * J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School, 1992; B.A., Yale University, 1987. This Essay was written in Alan A. Stone's seminar, "Psychoanalysis and Legal Assump- tions," given at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1991. The seminar provided a rare opportunity to explore theories of law, medical ethics, and artistic expression from an interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to Professor Stone, I am grateful to Martha Minow and Mithra Merryman for their insightful comments and challenging questions and to Carmel Sella and Lisa Hone for their invaluable editorial talents. -
Anna Journey, University of Southern California
Plath Profiles 83 After Ariel: An Argument for Sylvia Plath's Phantom Third Poetry Collection Anna Journey, University of Southern California Phantoms abound in the Sylvia Plath canon. Plath burned her second novel, meant as a gift for her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes, on his birthday in August 1962. Doubletake, Plath's unfinished third novel, "disappeared somewhere around 1970"—long after Plath's suicide in February 1963—Hughes suggests in his introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1). According to Diane Middlebrook's biography of the Hughes/Plath marriage, Her Husband, Plath wrote her patroness, Olive Higgins Prouty, that "[Doubletake's] plot was 'semiautobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer'" (198). Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill, after reading the nascent novel, grew offended by the manner in which Plath caricatured the Wevills, as "a 'detestable and contemptible' couple called 'The Goos-Hoppers'"; Wevill openly hoped Hughes would destroy the unfinished novel (Middlebrook 220). More disturbingly, Wevill absconded with some of Plath's valuable manuscripts, which she sent to her sister, intending the stolen literary relics as a "nest egg" for Shura (the daughter Wevill had with Hughes; the daughter she later murdered during her own suicide via a gas oven) (Middlebrook 232). One is left wondering, "What happened to Doubletake?" Even The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000), edited by Karen Kukil, remain incomplete, as a total of two bound journals that Plath used during the last three years of her life are missing from the oeuvre. Hughes, in his foreword to Frances McCullough's 1982 abridged edition of Plath's journals, claims that one of the journals simply "disappeared," much like the draft of Doubletake, while he deliberately destroyed his wife's other "maroon-backed ledger," in order to spare their children from reading about the darkness of their mother's final days (xiv). -
I Have a Self to Recover: Sylvia Plath and the Literary Success of the Failed Suicide Clare Emily Clifford, Birmingham-Southern College
Plath Profiles 285 I Have a Self to Recover: Sylvia Plath and the Literary Success of the Failed Suicide Clare Emily Clifford, Birmingham-Southern College How shall I age into that state of mind? I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat. Sylvia Plath, "Electra on Azalea Path" For most people, Sylvia Plath's work represents the epitome of suicidal poetry. The corpus of her poetic oeuvre forever captures the exhumation and resurrection of the material corpses it recomposes through figuration—fragments of bone from the colossal father, the "rubble of skull plates" in the cadaver room, Lady Lazarus' perpetual suicide strip-tease (Collected Poems 114). Plath's poetry is virtually a playground of decomposition; her speakers inhabit a "cramped necropolis," piecing together a ferocious love gathered among the graves (117). By collecting the force of this energy, Plath's work evidences a honed, disciplined voice of controlled extremity. This leads many critics, and often my students, to read into Plath's poetic intensity that she is an angry poet—considering her characters and poetic speakers' fierce energy as evidence of Plath's own anger. But as Plath's speakers wrestle with their anger on the page, they reveal the pain they feel and peace they fiercely and desperately wish for. This anger derives from their frustrated desire to find a lasting peace by recovering language from the constriction of suicidal thinking. Her speakers' rage represents the voice of anger turned against the self. Scavenging the ruins of the suicide's inner landscape—their inscape—Plath's speakers piece themselves together, death after self-inflicted death, becoming virtual experts at trying to recover from failed suicides.1 1 The field of Suicidology uses the term "completed suicide" to distinguish "individuals who have died by their own hand; have been sent to a morgue, funeral home, burial plot, or crematory; and are beyond any therapy" (Maris 15). -
Double Image : the Hughes-Plath Relationship As Told in Birthday Letters
Copyright is owned by the Author of the thesis. Permission is given for a copy to be downloaded by an individual for the purpose of research and private study only. The thesis may not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of the Author. Double Image: The Hughes-Plath Relationship As Told in Birthday Letters. .A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University Helen Jacqueline Cain 2002 II CONTENTS Abstract................................................ .iii Acknowledgements ....................................... .iv Introduction.............................................. 1 Chapter One -Ted Hughes on Trial. ......................... 10 Chapter Two - The Structure of Birthday Letters. ...............22 Chapter Three - Delivered of Yourself........................ .40 Chapter Four - The Man in Black. .................... 53 Chapter Five - Daddy Coming Up From Out of the Well......... 69 Chapter Six - Fixed Stars Govern a Life ........................74 Conclusion............................................... 80 Works Cited.............................................. 83 Works Consulted......................................... 87 iii ABSTRACT Proceeding from a close reading of both Birthdqy Letters and the poems of Sylvia Plath, and also from a consideration of secondary and biographical works, I argue that implicit within Birthdqy Letters is an explanation for Sylvia Plath's death and Ted Hughes's role in it. Birthdqy Letters is a collection of 88 poems written by Ted Hughes to his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, in the years following her death. There are two aspects to the explanation Ted Hughes provides. Both are connected to Sylvia Plath's poetry. Her development as a poet not only causes her death as told in Birthdqy Letters, but it also renders Ted Hughes incapable of helping her, because through her poetry he is made to adopt the role of Plath's father. -
Fine Books and Manuscripts Books Fine
Wednesday 21 March 2018 21 March Wednesday FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS | Knightsbridge, London | Wednesday 21 March 2018 24633 FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS Wednesday 21 March 2018 at 10am Knightsbridge, London BONHAMS ENQUIRIES Please see page 2 for bidder Montpelier Street Matthew Haley information including after-sale Knightsbridge Simon Roberts collection and shipment. London SW7 1HH Luke Batterham www.bonhams.com Sarah Lindberg Please see back of catalogue +44 (0) 20 7393 3828 for important notice to bidders VIEWING +44 (0) 20 7393 3831 Sunday 18 March ILLUSTRATIONS 11am - 3pm Shipping and Collections Front cover: Lot 83 Monday 19 March Leor Cohen Back cover: Lot 245 9am - 4.30pm +44 (0) 20 7393 3841 Tuesday 20 March +44 (0) 20 7393 3879 Fax 9am - 4.30pm [email protected] Please note that Bonhams will be closed Friday 30 March BIDS PRESS ENQUIRIES 2018 – Monday 2 April 2018 +44 (0) 20 7447 7447 [email protected] for the Easter Holiday. +44 (0) 20 7447 7401 fax [email protected] CUSTOMER SERVICES To bid via the internet Monday to Friday please visit www.bonhams.com 8.30am – 6pm +44 (0) 20 7447 7447 New bidders must also provide proof of identity when submitting LIVE ONLINE BIDDING IS bids. Failure to do this may result AVAILABLE FOR THIS SALE in your bids not being processed. Please email [email protected] with “Live bidding” in the subject Please note that bids should be line up to 48 hours before the submitted no later than 4pm on auction to register for this service. -
"Lady Lazarus" Is a Poem Commonly Understood to Be About Suicide. It Is Narrated by a Woman, and Mostly Addressed to an Unspecified Person
1 Lady Lazarus Sylvia Plath Summary "Lady Lazarus" is a poem commonly understood to be about suicide. It is narrated by a woman, and mostly addressed to an unspecified person. The narrator begins by saying she has "done it again." Every ten years, she manages to commit this unnamed act. She considers herself a walking miracle with bright skin, her right foot a "paperweight," and her face as fine and featureless as a "Jew linen". She addresses an unspecified enemy, asking him to peel the napkin from her face. She inquires whether he is terrified by the features he sees there. She assures him that her "sour breath" will vanish in a day. She is certain that her flesh will soon be restored to her face after having been sacrificed to the grave. She will then be a smiling thirty-year old woman. She will ultimately be able to die nine times, like a cat. Shehas just completed her third death. She will die once each decade. After each death, a "peanut-crunching crowd" shoves in to see her body unwrapped. She addresses the crowd directly, showing them she remains skin and bone, unchanged from who she was before. The first death occurred when she was ten, accidentally. The second death was intentional. She did not mean to return from it. Instead, she was as "shut as a seashell" until she was called back by people who then picked the worms off her corpse. She does not specifically identify how either death occurred. She believes that "Dying / Is an art, like everything else," and that she does it very well. -
Sylvia and the Absence of Life Before Ted
http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2018v23n1p133 SYLVIA AND THE ABSENCE OF LIFE BEFORE TED. Mariana Chaves Petersen* Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Rio Grande do Sul Abstract: As Bronwyn Polaschek mentions in The Postfeminist Biopic, the film Sylvia (Christine Jeffs, 2003) is based on biographies of Sylvia Plath that focus on her relationship with husband Ted Hughes – such as Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman. In this paper, grounded in the works of Linda Hutcheon, Mary E. Hawkesworth, and Tracy Brain, I argue that this biography works as a palimpsest of Sylvia and that the film constructs Plath as the Ariel persona, neglecting her “Juvenilia” – her early poetry, as it has been defined by Hughes. Sylvia actually leaves Plath’s early life – before she met Hughes – aside and it thus ends up portraying her more as a wife than as a writer. Finally, by bringing information on Plath’s life before she met Hughes from a more recent biography (by Andrew Wilson), I analyze how a different image of Plath might have been created if this part of her life were not missing in the film. Keywords: Sylvia. Sylvia Plath. Adaptation studies. Biopic. Feminist criticism. She wanted to be everything, I think. She was always searching for the self that she was going to be. — Elinor Friedman Klein, qtd. in Andrew Wilson, Mad Girl Love’s Song How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl? — Sylvia Plath, from her journals Introduction: a chosen branch Several were the attempts to fictionalize Sylvia Plath by making her a character in novels, poems, films, and biographies. -
Review of the Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (British Library 2010), ISBN
Plath Profiles 361 Review of The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath (British Library 2010), ISBN: 978-0-712351-02-7 and The Spoken Word: Ted Hughes: Poems and Short Stories (British Library and BBC 2008), ISBN: 978-0-712305-49-5 Carol Bere Dramatic, visceral, occasionally mesmerizing, memorable—there is little question that these separate recordings from the archives of the BBC and the British Library of live and studio broadcasts of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes reading their poetry offer sheer pleasure in themselves. Yet let me offer a brief caveat at the outset: this review is in no way meant to be a comparison of the poetry of Plath and Hughes, or a critical analysis of the ways in which they influenced each other's work—although I do assume mutual influence at various stages in their writing (and lives)—but rather a commentary on the separate BBC recordings, and perhaps a recognition of areas or periods of intersection in their careers. Hughes obviously had a much longer career, and these BBC recordings (two discs) reflect a span of over 30 years of writing, while the Plath recording (one disc) includes poems and interviews beginning in late l960 through January 1963. Along with knowledgeable introductions to the recordings by Peter K. Steinberg (Plath) and Alice Oswald (Hughes), respectively, these recordings are also invaluable guides to the early work (particularly in Plath's case), "hearing" both poets in the process of becoming, and, perhaps, gaining additional perspective on the poetry of both poets. What is also apparent in these recordings of Plath and Hughes is the necessity, or more realistically, the benefits of hearing poetry read aloud to fully understand the range of a poet's enterprise and achievement. -
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Layers of Literary Collaboration and The
Plath Profiles 275 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Layers of Literary Collaboration and the Perpetuation of the Poetic Voice Natalie Chambers The partnership of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath was arguably one of the most mutually productive literary pairings of the twentieth century, and while the work produced during their six-and-a-half year marriage was substantial in its sheer volume and artistic merit, the bulk of the critical discussion regarding their partnership focuses not on their prolific literary production but on the marriage itself and the events that led up to Plath's suicide in February of 1963. While countless books and critical essays have been written, at a distance, about this relationship—their partnership and the tumultuous passion that fueled their creative fires—these texts are inextricably rooted in speculation, cultivated by critical hypotheses and, ultimately, dependent upon the interpretations of outsiders. Even the most in-depth investigations of their marriage and respective works—like the many biographies and essays written by major Plath scholars Susan Van Dyne, Jacqueline Rose, Lynda Bundtzen, and Anne Stevenson, as well as the biography of their marriage written by Diane Middlebrook—still remain mere versions of the truth, individual interpretations of the details that constituted a collaborative life, the work it created, and the eventual culmination in Plath's death. It is not uncommon for artists to gain posthumous notoriety and critical attention, and thus sell more of their work, as was the case with Sylvia Plath. Though her death was undoubtedly a tragic loss of talent and silencing of a powerful poetic voice, it also evoked a conflagration of public and critical interest in her work and created a flurry of activity among the literary community to publish it. -
Mrs. Luthke 2018-2019 Page | 1 Siddhartha by Herman Hesse the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho 8 Poems by a Teacher-Approved
Mrs. Luthke 2018-2019 Page | 1 English 12 AP Summer Assignment Overview Grade 12 Siddhartha by Herman Hesse Prose Reading: Advanced Placement The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho Expect to take a quote identification/ analysis test on Siddhartha and The Alchemist within 8 Poems by a teacher-approved poet the first full week of school. (100 or poet from the following: points) Maya Angelou, Matthew Arnold, John Ashberry, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, You will also create a slide William Blake, Gwendolyn Brooks, presentation with 2-3 of your Lucille Clifton, S. T. Coleridge, Countee classmates which compares & Cullen, e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, contrasts some aspect of the two John Donne, Rita Dove, Lawrence young men’s journeys. (25 points) Ferlinghetti, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Seamus Poetry: Heaney, Robert Herrick, A.E.Housman, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, John You will need to complete typed Keats, Robert Lowell, Pablo Neruda, analyses of 8 poems that will be Wilfred Owen, Robert Pinsky, Sylvia turned in to turnitin.com before or Plath, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, by the second day of school, Friday, Theodore Roethke, Christina Rossetti, September 7th. (30 points) Our Carl Sandburg, Anne Sexton, William Class ID is18222391 and our Class Shakespeare, P. B. Shelley, Stevie password is Luthke12. Smith, Edmund Spenser, Wislawa Szymborska, Dylan Thomas, John Updike, Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman, Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth ** Further details available online via the Woodbury School web page and via the English 12 AP teacher Mrs. Luthke 2018-2019 Page | 2 AP English 12 Summer Reading The Required Commitment .