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Early Public Representations of : An Analysis of the Sylvia Plath issue of The Review Gina Hodnik, Northern Illinois University

During its ten year run from 1962 to 1972 The Review was, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, one of the "most influential British Literary Journals of the time" (Serafin 129). Other critics, such as Blake Morrison, have also commented on the magazine's literary prestige and relevance, noting that "the trenchancy of The Review was acknowledged far beyond and " (Harsent 23). In short, having poems or a critical essay published in The Review meant that the author was a serious writer. This prestige stems from, in part, the editor Ian Hamilton's famous rigid standards and honest criticism of poetry. The Review was, as critic Michael Fried calls it, a "one-man show"; it was "guided by 'man alone' rather than a school of thought or by some doctrinal expression larger than the self" (Harsent 131, Hoffman, Allen, & Ulrich 190). Hamilton's heavy-handed involvement in the magazine made the magazine both, paradoxically, personally biased and unbiased. As an unsponsored publication, a little magazine is "one which exists, indeed thrives, outside the usual business structure of magazine production and distribution; it is independent, amateur and idealistic- it doesn't…need to print anything it doesn't want to print" (Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors 7-8). This made it possible to write more honest criticism without trying to please the larger forces of the publishing world. However, since little magazines, such as The Review, remained under the control of one editor, it would be impossible to say that personal predisposition did not bias the magazine. Specifically, the special Sylvia Plath issue of The Review appears to be shaped by personal involvement, not just by Hamilton but also by , Plath's husband, and Al Alvarez, their friend

Hodnik 260 and fellow writer. The issue was published in October of 1963, just eight months after Plath's suicide, and includes seven poems, some previously unpublished, as well as a critical essay by Alvarez. In an epistolary correspondence between Hughes and Hamilton before publication, Hughes told Hamilton that, in talking with Alvarez, they both felt that "his piece wouldn't make sense if some of the poems he mentions weren't with it," so Hughes sent Hamilton these poems, in addition to poems not mentioned in Alvarez's essay.1 Looking not only at the poems included ("Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "Fever 103°," "Nick and the Candlestick," "Brasilia," "Mary's Song," and "Lesbos") and the Alvarez essay in the magazine issue itself, but also selected letters and criticism of the time, provides evidence that Hamilton, Alvarez, and Hughes together, purposely or unconsciously, argued for a very specific view of Plath and her poetry. The Plath issue of The Review, along with manuscript material, seems to suggest that the poems she wrote in the last few months of her life are a medium for Plath to forge a separate identity through self-control. Portraying Plath in this way additionally gives her a distinct identity as a writer, separate from her domestic life and the drama connected with it. One distinguishing characteristic of Alvarez's essay in the Plath issue is that he uses the poems to outline distinct personality traits. Alvarez does not merely examine connecting images in her poems; he uses repeated images in her poetry and her techniques to suggest that Plath, in her poetry, attempted to create a distinct identity through the obvious rejection of domestic roles. In his essay, Alvarez notes that Plath's "real poems began in 1960, after the birth of her daughter Frieda" while "her most creative period followed the birth of her son, two years later" ("Sylvia Plath" 77). For Alvarez, "it is as though the child were a proof of her identity, as though it liberated her into her real self" (77). Alvarez's essay and the selected poems in the Plath issue suggest that Plath attempts to reject these old roles to establish her own separate identity. More importantly, the essay and selected poems, by not focusing on her marriage to Hughes, separate Plath from the drama associated with her married life. Alvarez commends Plath on her ability "to make startling images out of humdrum objects"; she makes the familiar and predictable new (76). In other words, altering familiar domestic images parallels Plath's need to make her established roles new; she attempts to change her identity into something unique. In the poems selected for The Review Plath makes the

1 Found in Box 1, folder 9 of The Review Manuscripts collection in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

Plath Profiles 261 domestic realm startling by connecting it with mass extinction. Once again, of all the poems Hughes could have selected to send to Hamilton, Hughes selected a prevalent number of poems connecting domestic life to mass extinction and the Holocaust, such as "Mary's Song," "Daddy," and "Lesbos," perhaps attempting to emphasize Plath's need to destroy the binding established roles of mother and daughter. In "Mary's Song," the image of the "Sunday lamb [that] cracks in its fat," a sign of motherly domesticity in that it involves a woman preparing a meal for the household, turns from familiar and expected into the unexpected and violent when Plath compares cooking to "melting the tallow heretics, / ousting the Jews" (Plath, Selected Poems 257). First, connecting this domestic act to the mass destruction of the Jews subverts the domestic role; through her poetry, Plath makes a familiar role new. Also, the parallel to mass destruction illustrates the reason for making this domestic role new and unexpected: domesticity can damage a woman's sense of self. The Holocaust images in "Daddy" also suggest that Plath wants to recreate her previous role as daughter, a role that destroys her sense of self. She connects the father to Hitler by calling him "a man in black with a Meinkampf look" (224). By linking her father with Hitler and herself with a Jew, she subverts her traditional role of a daughter and emphasizes the destructive power of this established role. In "Lesbos," she also links a more standard domestic role with destruction when she describes the "viciousness in the kitchen" with the "fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine" (227). Here, the kitchen appears to be a painful place that can bring only harm to the occupant. In these selected poems, Plath rejects an old way of life by altering it into something new, but also in connecting domestic roles to images of mass destruction which implies that she needs to destroy these established roles before they destroy her as an individual. The vampire bat is one connecting image that illustrates an attempt to shed the pre- established roles of daughter and mother. The bat represents feeling suffocated from a domineering force, a dominant identity. In "Nick and the Candlestick," Plath is a "miner" exploring caves where the "black bat airs / wrap [her], raggy shawls" and "weld to [her] like plums" (240-241). The bat image enfolds the woman; by connecting the bat airs to a shawl, Plath suggests that it covers her. The word "weld" characterizes the bat as a force that wraps around her persistently, which covers her completely. Furthermore, by setting the scene in a cave, Plath emphasizes a feeling of being enclosed, suffocated. The bat imagery in "Lesbos" likewise symbolizes a larger force that encircles Plath, a force so dominant it begins to erase her

Hodnik 262 identity. In "Lesbos," she complains that the other woman's "voice" is her "ear-ring, / flapping and sucking, blood loving bat" (229). Someone else's voice wraps around her; the voice, as a bat, is a force that dominates Plath, preventing her from hearing her own voice. In "Daddy," the bat acts again as a dominant force that muffles the Plath, literally sucking away her life; she experiences "the vampire who said he was [her father] / and drank [her] blood for a year" (224). Plath extends the image of the bat, connecting it even more to vampirism by then likening her father to a vampire with "a stake in [his] fat black heart" (224). Her father and the man who resembles him, Hughes, are portrayed as forces that drain her identity; her identity exists only in relation to them. Additionally, over half of the seven selected poems end with the image of Plath rejecting dominant forces that previously controlled her. At the end of "Daddy," she manages to throw off this dominant vampire that sucks out her life, her identity. She says to her domineering father that she "[has] had to kill [him]" (222). Significantly, she ends by again talking directly to her father, saying, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (224). Plath finally stands up to the vampire-like force, the "black shoe" that she has "lived like a foot," trying to mold to (222). Alvarez notes that Plath "seemed convinced, in these last poems, that the root of her suffering was the death of her father […] who dragged her after him" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 81). "Lady Lazarus" revolts against a dominant parental force that shaped Plath's identity; the poem describes her as someone else's "valuable / the pure gold baby" (Plath, Selected Poems 246). She prefaces these descriptions with "I am," thereby connecting her identity to being an object of value, a child, for someone else (246). By telling the audience repeatedly to "Beware" and by rising up to "eat men like air," she then illustrates her revolt against the forces that previously shaped her identity; she finally stands up, rises, for herself (246-247). In these two poems, Plath specifically rejects her established child identity; she refuses to be defined through her parents. She is no longer someone's child; instead, she takes a step towards becoming her own separate individual. In "Fever 103°" and "Lesbos," Plath likewise attempts to break free from confining means of identity. In "Fever 103°," she destroys her other self, the one that depends on another person. She says she cannot try to be like other people- "not him, nor him"- and then describes her "selves dissolving" (232). The selves that are based on other people, specifically men, are destroyed. In "Lesbos," she also distances herself from a dominant force who attempts to suck

Plath Profiles 263 out her identity by finally stating that "even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet" (230). Plath declines a connection with this woman who talks so much that Plath cannot hear her own voice; by not meeting with the other woman, she refuses to be a part of her. As a final step, Plath does more than just reject an identity that ties her to domineering forces; she also begins to create her new and separate self. Agreeing with Leonard Sanazaro, critics Guinevara Nance and Judith Jones feel that the Ariel poems, which include the poems published in The Review, purposely uses images associated with transformation and exorcism to lead to a creation of a new self and a rejection of old fantasies (Wagner-Martin, Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath 89, 139). Plath represents a new and separate self in these selected poems through images of rebirth. In "Lady Lazarus," Plath goes beyond rejecting her old identity to actually creating a new identity. She "turn[s] and burn[s]" and then turns to "ash"; Plath's old self dissolves, burns away (Plath, Selected Poems 246). Then Plath invokes the phoenix, a mythical bird that is reborn from the ashes of its death fire, by rising "out of the ash" (247). By rising out of the ash, Plath’s speaker is reborn; she has successfully created a new self, a new identity. Likewise, in "Fever 103°" Plath also experiences rebirth from the ashes of fire. Throughout the poem the she burns up with a fever; she is, metaphorically, on fire. She asks the audience if "[her] heat astound[s] [them]" which makes it seem as if she were on fire (232). She "thinks [she] may rise" from this fire and she does, reborn from her own death (232). The images of rebirth suggest a creation of a new self; Plath finally takes control of the dominant forces that control her identity to create her own separate identity. Similarly, the images of birth present throughout these poems indicate the creation of a new person, a new self. In her Plath biography, Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson thinks that "Nick and the Candlestick" merges Plath's "dual duties as mother by day and writer by night, writing by candlelight" (271). In "Nick and the Candlestick," when Plath discusses her existence as a writer, a separate person not tied to her children, she exists in an "old cave," described as an "earthen womb" (Plath, Selected Poems 241, 240). In a sense, she has returned to an embryonic state, ready for birth. The same image of the Earth as a mother also presents itself in "Brasilia." Plath first identifies herself as a mother, telling the reader that "[her] baby" has "driven" his nail in her thumb (258). However, Plath then claims that she is "nearly extinct"; her identity as a mother fades (258). She then invokes the "red earth, motherly blood" that eats "people like light rays," but the Earth doesn't swallow her; she will not be reborn from an earthen womb (258-259).

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Instead, she remains "one mirror safe"; she continues to reflect others, as a mirror does, and does not get a chance at rebirth (259). Regardless, "Brasilia" shows Plath's desire to eradicate her domestic identity through rebirth. Alvarez also comments on Plath creating a new identity in her later poems; to Alvarez, Plath's later poems are vocal poems, meant, as she states in her 1962 interview with Peter Orr, "to be read out loud" (Orr 171). Only when Plath "had discovered her own speaking voice; that is, her own identity" could she "write poems out loud" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 77). Alvarez connects this later group of poems to Plath's search for a separate identity with the sound of her poems. Interestingly, Linda Wagner-Martin notes that Alvarez's review of Plath's The Colossus in The Observer was "a highly favorable notice, but had one reservation— that Plath has not yet developed a constant voice" (Sylvia Plath: A Biography 180). In evaluating some of Plath's newer poems in the essay in The Review, Alvarez feels that Plath had found her voice; she had created a separate identity from Ted Hughes. Critics at the time also acknowledge this aspect of her poetry. Richard Howard feels that Plath "prefers to make [the audience] hear what she sees," and the fault in the poems is when she becomes too "concerned with texture and loses the image" (Wagner-Martin, Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath 45). Judson Jerome takes a similar view of Plath's poems; he says they restore his faith in poetry because her descriptions "create certain sounds and textures" (44). In his review, Mark Linenthal also praises Plath's ability to make a poem of sounds, calling the sounds of the poems "masculine and strong" (47). In many of the poems selected for the Plath issue, a woman has problems speaking; as Alvarez suggests in his article, Plath must find her voice to find her own identity. In "Daddy," she says that she "never could talk to [her] father," and that she "could hardly speak" in general (Plath, Selected Poems 223). Furthermore, she says that she then "began to talk like a Jew" until she thinks she "may well be a Jew" (223). Her absence of speech, absence of individual voice, emphasizes her lack of individual identity. Because Plath relates the father-daughter relationship to the hierarchy between a German soldier and a Jew, talking like a Jew means that she talks like a submissive daughter instead of an individual; Plath fits into an inferior role. Similarly, in "Lesbos," she grows "silent" and "[does] not speak" when in contact with a controlling force (229). She listens to the woman who preys upon her like a "blood-loving bat" and sucks out her life (229). In these poems, Plath loses her voice, her identity, when under control of dominant

Plath Profiles 265 forces that bind her into a submissive role. Only by throwing off these forces and speaking for herself, finding her own voice, can Plath create a separate identity. The Plath issue of The Review portrays the poet as a woman concerned with creating a new identity separate from her domestic and familial identity. Alvarez's article also argues that she seeks this identity, gains this rebirth, through extreme self-control. Generally, through this self-control, Plath removes the control from others: only she can define her self. Specifically, Plath attempts to exert control through self-violence, equaling her oppressors in their cruelty. She attempts to control her emotions both in real life and in her poetry. Alvarez notes that Plath "was disciplined in art, as in everything else" ("Sylvia Plath" 76). As a friend and reader of her work, Alvarez notes Plath's perfectionism, her need to control her life. Other critics and biographers also note this trait in relation to her poetry: Linda Wagner- Martin reiterates the idea throughout her biography that, for Plath, "enjoying an activity was not enough reason for spending time on it" (Sylvia Plath: A Biography 38). Wagner-Martin also mentions that Plath devoted her time to endeavors that would bring success; for instance, she quit playing piano as a child because she was not very good and, therefore, would not earn any prizes (38). Wagner-Martin illustrates Plath's drive for success and her intense self-control; when Plath had a goal, nothing would get in the way, not even herself. In her letters to her mother, Plath often references the amount of control that went in to her writing process, saying on May 1, 1961, for example, that she has "been writing seven mornings a week at the Merwin's study and [has] done better things than ever before" (Letters Home 418). Plath describes her writing schedule in detail to her mother on October 12, 1962, telling her that every morning she is "up about five, in [her] study with coffee, writing like mad- have managed a poem a day before breakfast" (466). In life and in her writing, Plath remained controlled and efficient. Alvarez believes that Plath attempts to achieve total self-control by turning "the violence against herself so as to show that she can equal her oppressors with her self-inflicted oppression" ("Sylvia Plath" 82). He then connects this need for self-control to identity, noting that "by inflicting this upon yourself you achieve your identity, you become free" (82). This theory of the need for an artist to destroy themselves through self-inflicted violence later develops into Alvarez's theory of Extremist Art, which he explains in The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, published in 1972, eight years after his essay in the Plath issue of The Review was printed. For Alvarez an extreme "artist deliberately explores in himself that narrow violent area between the

Hodnik 266 viable and the impossible" in order to produce art (The Savage God 267). Furthermore, it is widely known that "Alvarez favors poetry which lives on the edge psychologically of the extreme. He champions poetry that tackles directly personal or historical situations rather than sweeping them under the carpet or refusing to deal with them" (Baker 1). Michael Payne, in an essay about Alvarez, notes that Plath is an apotheosis of his ideas about how an extreme artist turns a "craftsman-like transformation of extreme mental suffering into art in such a way that it produces something perhaps new and exciting" (Holden & Kermode 90). In other words, Plath creates a distinct new identity in her poems by taking control of her suffering. The selected poems in the Plath issue all share images of personal destruction, most commonly in the form of Holocaust references. In "Daddy," she confesses that she has a proclivity to self torture: "every woman adores a Fascist, / the boot in the face" (Plath, Selected Poems 223). The desire for a boot in the face shows a masochistic tendency; Plath wants to be hurt. In "Lady Lazarus" she also adores self-torture; she tries to kill herself and she "[does] it so it feels like hell" (245). Yet, for all the times she attempts suicide, she comes back in "broad day / to the same place, the same face, the same brute" (246). Despite wanting to escape the pain of daily life, Plath always comes back as "the same, identical woman" (245). At the end of "Lady Lazarus," Plath points out that she cannot kill the body; she must control this same identical identity by destroying it and rising with a new identity. "Fever 103°" modifies the need for self- control by presenting the Plath's desire to control her own suffering: she is "in a fright / one scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel" (231). In this allusion to the death of dancer Isadora Duncan, who was killed when her scarf caught in the wheel of a car, Plath expresses fright at dying accidently; she wishes to control her own pain and death. Violence for Plath is a means of power; in fact, "most of her later poems are about just that: about the unleashing of power, about tapping that roots of her own inner violence" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 78). The poem also contains a reference to "Hiroshima ash," which invokes images of mass destruction and torture (Plath, Selected Poems 231). "Mary's Song" contains more vivid references to mass destruction; Plath compares a Sunday dinner to "ousting the Jews" in the Holocaust (257). Even Hamilton notes that, in "Mary's Song," "roasting the Sunday lamb can be seen finally as a holocaust" (Against Oblivion 299). Pain for Plath "is a heart / this holocaust [she] walk[s] in," meaning that her daily holocaust exists in her heart; it is self-created hell (Plath, Selected Poems 257). In "Nick and the Candlestick," Plath's self-pain appears less pronounced, not as extreme, but she

Plath Profiles 267 still tells her child that "the pain / [he] wake[s] to is not [his]"; the pain is the mother's self- induced pain (241). By inflicting violence and destruction on herself Plath not only gains control of herself, she also destroys her previous self to create a new identity. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Ian Hamilton indicates Hamilton believes that "good poems were likely, in a more general sense, to show a union of suffering and control" (Miller). In other words, to create good poetry, some suffering is involved, but only closely controlled suffering. When Hughes sent Hamilton the photograph used for the cover of the Plath issue, he warned Hamilton to guard it carefully because Plath had very thoroughly destroyed all photos of herself and Hughes only had a few photos of Sylvia in his possession.2 In real life, Plath had destroyed a representation of her old self, a photo; perhaps this was a way to exert control over her old self, a self based upon relationships with her family and Hughes, in order to establish a new separate identity. By turning her strongest feelings into objective images, Plath proves that she is in control of her self and her poetry. Critical reviews written before the publication of Ariel, the book from which the selected poems in The Review come from, highlight Plath's lack of control over her poetic persona and her emotions in her first poetry collection, The Colossus. In an article written before his essay in The Review, Alvarez praises The Colossus: he describes the strongest parts of her poetic style as "no-nonsense" and "bare but vivid and precise" (Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage 34). His praise of her stems from his observation that some parts of the poems manage to steer clear of emotional excess. He does acknowledge that her poems have weak spots: "at times her feeling weakens, the language goes off on its own and she lands in blaring rhetoric" (35). For Alvarez, the best part of Plath's early group of poems is her focus on connecting simple images and not in her emotional connection with subjects. Significantly, Hamilton also published an article on Plath in July of 1963, three months before the Plath edition of The Review. Unlike Alvarez, however, Hamilton critiques her earlier poetry harshly. He begins by calling The Colossus a "witty and sophisticated first volume" — but that is the only praise he gives the book (Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage 48). Like Alvarez, he finds Plath's strongest poems to have minimal personal involvement; he criticizes her for emotional

2 Found in Box 6, folder 67 of The Review Manuscripts collection in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University.

Hodnik 268 excess. Hamilton also criticizes Alvarez's 1960 review in The Observer for praising the intensity of certain poems. For Hamilton, Plath's poems "take the concrete world and fragment it into emblems of menace" (49). Hamilton writes that "less successful poems testify to the appalling difficulties she faced as a persona and a poet" (49). Hamilton obviously feels that Plath's earlier poetry, while important enough to publish a review about it, shows her struggle to carve out a poetic identity which relies too heavily on emotion. When reviewing poems from Ariel, however, Alvarez notes a change in style and a more definitive voice. In a 1965 review, Alvarez praises the emotion surging through that collection. Ariel, as a collection, appears more emotionally wrought than The Colossus because many of the poems were written around or after her separation from Hughes; the poems in Ariel are angrier. He marvels at how one incident "gathers into a whole complicated nexus of feelings" (Wagner- Martin, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage 57). In this later review, Alvarez praises the excess of emotion because of the way Plath presents it. In his essay in the Plath issue of The Review, Alvarez notes that the "more objective [the details] seem, the more subjective they, in fact, become" ("Sylvia Plath" 78). In other words, Plath manages to use an objective and impersonal image to accurately capture her deepest emotional state. He later comments that "what is remarkable about the poem[s] is the objectivity with which she handles such personal material" (80). In addition, in an interview with Gregory Lestage, Alvarez mentions that Plath's "rage is so beautifully controlled" (Holden & Kermode 125). Through her poetry, Plath shows that, as a poet, she has mastery over her emotional states. Hamilton views this objectivity of personal matter and the use of minimal images as a mark of strong poetry. Friends and colleagues note Hamilton believed that good poetry should be austere; Dan Jacobson mentions that Pound's imagist project was important to Hamilton and that Hamilton felt that "the poet should get to the heart of the matter…and then get rid of the furniture" (Harsent 90). Jacobson also mentions that Hamilton hated "the idea of narrative in poetry" (89). As an interesting side note, Hamilton outwardly showed signs of his interest in minimalism: he ate little to nothing at restaurants. Julian Barnes recounts that Hamilton left his plate "piled with food"; Alvarez mentions that Hamilton "ends up eating almost nothing"; and Douglas Dunn mentions "Ian's lack of appetite" (18, 36, 60). Hamilton's Spartan dining habit highlights one of his key beliefs as an editor: The Review was respected, as Andrew Motion mentions, for its "mixture of heady austerity and an unnerving but familiar tone" (37). This

Plath Profiles 269 explains why he viewed some of Plath's earlier poems negatively for having too much personal involvement and emotion even though Peter Dales notes that he thinks she offers "the chance of something more viable in some way- 'feelingful'" (50). In short, Plath's later poems are stronger, according to Hamilton and Alvarez, because she exhibits a mastery over her emotional states; she can shape them into any image she chooses. Overall, the Plath issue of The Review emphasizes Plath's creation of a new identity through self-control, both in her own life and in her poems. Given this specific portrayal of Plath, one wonders why Hamilton, Alvarez, and Hughes chose to emphasize Plath as an individual, separate from her family members. Perhaps Hughes and Alvarez wanted to prevent readers from connecting her with her separation from Hughes and her suicide; the poems and essay in The Review, which emphasize the creation of a new self, seems to insist that Plath should be viewed independently as a writer and not as a mother, wife, daughter, or even a neurotic. Alvarez may have had personal motivation to make this connection: Anne Stevenson notes that Plath was "in her most positive housekeeping-mothering phase" when Alvarez came to interview Hughes for The Observer (Stevenson 196). He met her without realizing that he had published her poem "Night Shift" in The Observer.3 Stevenson notes throughout her narrative that Plath kept up correspondence with Alvarez, informing him about her creative breakthroughs. She charts their burgeoning relationship; in the summer of 1962, "Sylvia was beginning to feel at ease with Alvarez" (247). Alvarez initially judged Plath, thinking of her only in relation to Hughes. Perhaps this mistake made him wary of seeing her too strongly as a housewife; after the separation from Hughes and her suicide, it would be all too easy for the public to focus more on her familial relations than her poetry style. Maybe he wanted the public to view her, immediately, as he eventually thought of her: a skilled poet. Alvarez, in an interview with George Lestage in 1996, said that there were "two Sylvia Plaths: One is the woman who wrote The Bell Jar and then had that famous marital break-up […]. The other Sylvia is the poet who wrote these unbelievably good poems" (Holden & Kermode 125). Looking back over thirty three years of Plath scholarship, Alvarez criticizes the response to Plath as a feminist icon, wishing that some of the earlier critics had seen past her marital and mental difficulties. It is as if, in the essay in The Review, Alvarez anticipates this reaction to Plath and attempts to prevent it.

3 "Night Shift" was published under the title "Poem" on June 14, 1959, page 22.

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Hughes also plays a role, although minor, in the characterization of Plath in Alvarez's essay. First, the references to Hughes in Alvarez's article are scarce. Alvarez mentions him only twice: once as the person Plath "married in 1956" and then as an "influence" on her work ("Sylvia Plath" 75, 76). As discussed earlier, Hughes's letter to Hamilton shows that Hughes had an influence over the poems presented in the Plath issue of The Review, but the amount of his influence on Alvarez's essay remains unknown. Nearly eight years after the Plath issue of The Review was published, The Times informed the public that The Observer would not print the second installment of The Savage God that dealt with Plath's "road to suicide" because Hughes complained that Alvarez's memoir was written without consulting him and that Alvarez's facts are "not only extremely fragmentary, they are mostly wrong" ("Sylvia Plath Memoir Dropped" 14). Alvarez countered that he wrote to counteract the Plath myths out of deep respect for her. Hughes refused to relent. The article in The Times provided evidence that Hughes wanted to keep Plath's dramatic personal life, which obviously included him, out of discussions about her poetry. Another interesting feature of Alvarez's essay, which removes the dramatic aspects of Plath's life, is that he does not use the word "suicide" to describe Plath's death. He refers only to her "death" and her "world collapsing" ("Sylvia Plath" 76, 80). In fact, the only time he does use the word is when he refers to a "near suicide at the age of nineteen" (76). Based on these cues, it seems probable that Hughes and Alvarez wanted to prevent readers from connecting Plath with her separation from Hughes and her suicide and instead attempted to suggest that readers should view her independently as a writer.

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Works Cited Alvarez, Al. "Sylvia Plath." Ed. Ian Hamilton. The Modern Poet. New York: Horizon Press, 1969: (75-82). Print. ---. The Savage God: A Study of Suicide. New York: Random House, 1972. Print. Baker, William. "The Mind Has Mountains: a.alvarez@lxx: a Review." Style, Spring 2000. Web. 7 Apr. 2009. Hamilton, Ian. Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth Century Poets. London: Viking, 2002. Print. ---. The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976. Print. Hamilton, Ian, ed. "Sylvia Plath: The Last Poems." The Review 9. October 1963: 3-26. Print. Harsent, David, ed. Another Round at the Pillars: Essays, Poems, & Reflections on Ian Hamilton. Cornwall, UK: Cargo Press, 1999. Print. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: a History and a Bibliography. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1947. Print. Holden, Anthony, & Frank Kermode, ed. The Mind Has Mountains. Cambridge: Los Poetry Press, 1999. Print. Manuscripts Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Northern Illinois University. The Review Manuscripts: Boxes 1, 2, 4, 6. Print. Miller, Karl. "Hamilton, (Robert) Ian." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Jan 2005. Web. 10 Apr. 2009. Orr, Peter. "Sylvia Plath." The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvert. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. 171. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. Print. ---. Letters Home: correspondence, 1950-1963. Aurelia Schoeber Plath, ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Print. ---. Selected Poems. Ted Hughes, ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. Print. Serafin, Steven, ed. "Ian Hamilton." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century British Literary Biographers 155. Detroit: Gale Group, 1995. 128-133. Print. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Print.

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"Sylvia Plath Memoir Dropped." The Times, 19 Nov. 1971: 14. Print. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Print. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1984. Print. ---, ed. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. New York, NY: Routledge, 1988. Print.