Sylvia Plath: Motherhood in her Poetry.

Resumen:Sylvia Plath es una de las más prestigiosas poetas del siglo XX, destacada representante de la poesía confesional. En sus poemas, Plath plasma conflictos y debates internos respecto a temas muy diversos y personales. En este trabajo de fin de grado se explora especialmente su concepción de la maternidad y cómo este tema evolucionó a lo largo de las distintas fases de su poesía. Para llevar a cabo el análisis, se han seleccionado sus poemas más representativos, enmarcándolos en su contexto histórico y literario, así como en el ambiente familiar y académico en el que Plath desarrolló su obra.Abstract:Sylvia Plath is one of the most prestigious poets of the 20th-century. She stands out as one of the main exponents of Confessional Poetry. In her poems, Plath portrays her inner conflicts and debates about very varied and personal matters. The main aim of this essay is to analyse how Sylvia Plath deals with the concepts of motherhood and maternity and how these themes evolve throughout her literary career. To carry out the analysis, the essay contextualises her life and work, focusing on a selection of representative poems. <br /

Vision and Visual Art in Sylvia Plath's Ariel and Last Poems

This dissertation is concerned with Sylvia Plath's late works. Engaging with critical discussion of what constitutes the corpus of Ariel, I show that an appreciation of the editorial history reveals the beginning of a third book (the last poems), and opens up those difficult texts to fresh enquiry. Recent work in Plath studies has focused on visual art. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley's Eye Rhymes examines Plath’s own artwork in ‘an attempt to answer the question, How did Plath arrive at Ariel? (1) I contribute to that discussion, but also ask the questions, How did Plath leave Ariel behind and arrive at the even more remarkable last poems, and how did visual art enable those journeys? I argue that Ariel’s characteristically lucid style is informed by the dismantling of depth perspective in Post-Impressionist painting, and by the colour theory and pedagogy of the Bauhaus teachers. My work is underpinned by an appreciation of Plath’s unique cultural moment in mid-century East Coast America. I show how Plath’s knowledge of the theories, practice and iconic images of visual art, from the old masters to the Post-Impressionists, offered new possibilities for stylistic development. Working with archival materials including annotated works from Plath’s personal library and drafts of her poems, as well as published material, I examine the synthesis of visual and literary influences. Demonstrating specific textual relations between Plath and the work of Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, as well as other poets, I show that Plath’s visual poetics combine influences from the modern poets with her New Critical training and with painting and sculpture. I offer new readings of rarely discussed poems, such as ‘Totem’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’ and ‘Child’, as well as fresh insights into the well known works, ‘Tulips’, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, ‘Fever 103º’, and ‘Edge’

Learning Opportunities 1990/1991

A Pioneering Educational Communit

'Ovid, Plath, Baskin, Hughes'

Many critical treatments of the poetic interaction of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have overlooked Hughes's 1997 translation of 24 episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tales from Ovid. This paper argues that the connections between Hughes, Plath, and Ovid that erupt in Hughes’s final two collections of poetry are similarly complex and longstanding. I begin by considering Hughes’s 1988 essay ‘Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of “Sheep in Fog”’, in which he becomes the first critic of Plath’s work to note her engagement with Ovidian figures. Building on Hughes’s argument that the mythic figures of Phaeton and Icarus provide the interpretative key for understanding Plath’s Ariel poems, I provide further examples of Ovidian figures in Plath’s poetry. To focalise the allusive nexus between Ovid, Plath, and Hughes, I compare Plath’s poem ‘Sculptor’ (1958) – dedicated to Leonard Baskin and in which Baskin is cast as Ovid’s Pygmalion – to the tale of Pygmalion as translated by Hughes in Tales from Ovid. I present some further evidence for Plath’s presence (or conspicuous absence) in Tales from Ovid, before discussing some implications of Hughes’s (re)arrangement of the translations. Finally, I suggest that while Birthday Letters represents an explicit engagement with Plath, Tales from Ovid presents an implicit dialogue with Plath’s work and her own Ovidian allusion

A Secret! a Secret! : Confession and Autobiography in the Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes.

This study explores the impact of changing definitions of confession on the critical reception and interpretation of the poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes. In light of the ongoing criticism concerning confessional poetry in the forty-one years since Robert Lowell\u27s Life Studies (1959) was published, it may seem difficult to justify yet another study of confessional poetry. However, the term has been so thoroughly assimilated into our critical vocabulary that we have lost an authentic sense of its meaning. Confessional poetry is in some ways an arbitrary term that has a very tenuous connection with the poetry it purports to describe. Even though the original sense of the term confession was a religious one, the term confessional poetry was coined in response to specific (and secular) poetic techniques employed by Robert Lowell in Life Studies. Over the past forty-one years, the connotations of the term have become increasingly wide-ranging. Poets as diverse as Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Sharon Olds have been called confessional poets---as have John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Frank Bidart, Jack Gilbert, and Louise Gluck. Despite great variation in the extent to which details of these poets\u27 lives appear in their work, even the hint of an autobiographical element to their work often ensures that they will be labeled as confessional poets. Consequently, formulating any sort of standard criteria by which to evaluate confessional poetry has become very difficult. Further, in the cases of the poets in this study---Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Ted Hughes---we have often neglected to ask where, specifically, the confessional label originates. Since the appearance of W. D. Snodgrass\u27s Heart\u27s Needle and Robert Lowell\u27s Life Studies in 1959, the body of criticism surrounding confessional poetry has functioned as Hepworth and Turner\u27s external control of its definition (albeit from many different perspectives). Ultimately, although the central requirements of confessional poetry remain the same---intimacy, a sense of guilt, and a difference in status between the confessor and the confessant---it is still impossible for critics to irrevocably determine what poetry is confessional and what is not

‘Ichthyologue’: Freshwater Biology in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

An ecocritical analysis of Ted Hughes's knowledge of freshwater biology and environmental science, especially the work of his son, Nicholas Hughes. Contains previously unpublished poetry drafts by Ted Hughes

The influence of African folktales on Sylvia Path's 'Ariel voice'

Includes bibliographical references.In this study I trace the influence of Paul Radin’s collection of African folktales on Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems. Elements from these tales have been identified by various critics in Plath’s “Poem for a Birthday” sequence which, according to Hughes, she wrote around the same time as she was reading the African tales. However, the importance of the tales to her later poetry has not yet been fully explored in Plath criticism. “Poem for a Birthday” marks an important stage in the emergence of what has become known as Plath’s “Ariel voice” and it is my contention that the influence of the African tales is significantly present even in this later work. The Ariel poems manifest a preoccupation with motherhood which merges thematically with creative fruitfulness. I examine how Plath adopts and uses the concept of “the African” in Ariel to represent repressed aspects of the human psyche which must emerge into consciousness in order for creative expression to attain a level of deep resonance. This engagement is repeatedly presented as a vital “primitive” force emerging from beneath a stony silent reality. The Africanfolktales provided Plath with a novel set of imagery and resources with which to portray this explorative process. I therefore explore Plath’s interest in “primitivism”. I also argue that the orality of the African tales inspired Plath to focus on the oral nature of her later writing. I hope in this study to free Plath’s Ariel voice from the shadow of her suicide. More importantly, I hope to show that her own collection of Ariel poems represented an important moment in her creative development that envisaged a vital spirit of possibility, activated dramatically by an engagement with Radin’s African tales

“Insane for the destination:” Disrupting the Teleological Impulses of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck

Despite their complex poetry, the critical scholarship of Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich has been dominated by oversimplistic and reductive biographical and feminist readings that fail to engage with the nuanced texts. By contrast, this paper intends to examine these poets through a post-structuralist feminist framework. Not only does such a perspective challenge pre-existing critical assumptions of both poets’ work, but it also draws attention to their key differences: their treatment of selfhood and history. In Ariel, Plath’s rejection of a final, transcendent telos informs a poetics that challenges the romantic humanist view of the uniform subject predicated on logocentrism. Diving into the Wreck, by contrast, relies on a linear, teleological view of history and language in order to reify a stable subject necessary for liberation

'inside my house of words': the poetry of Anne Stevenson

This thesis examines the relationship between autobiography and art in Anne Stevenson's work by exploring her poetic negotiation of her own presence within her poems, or 'house of words'.A brief contextual preface assesses Stevenson's importance as a poet and explains the rationale for this study.Chapter One relates the history of Stevenson's work in the context of her life. It also explores her own critical writing, and considers critics' views of her work.Chapter Two explores Stevenson's position in her poems which speak of the domestic house. Consistently wary of the confessional label, she erects the house of poetry as a house of words within the literal house, so that these poems become a dialogue between the personal and poetic 'I'.Chapter Three looks at her poems of place. Stevenson has lived in a number of towns and cities, and many feature in her poetry. However, in these poems she emerges as a shadowy presence that is both present and absent, so that biographical associations are both challenged and endorsed.Chapter Four explores her poems of the natural world. These poems reveal a keen observation of the world she sees. However, she is a self-confessed Darwinian, so these poems become a lively negotiation between Stevenson the evolutionist and Stevenson the poet.Chapter Five turns to her elegies for poets. The poems speak of her personal experiences of loss, but while hers is a cohesive voice, her relationship with the dead becomes less and less certain within this particular house of words.I conclude that her poems are founded on autobiography, but it is the negotiations of her own presence that give them their inbuilt strength