Abstract
A confessional poet, an extremist poet, a post-romantic poet, a pre-feminist poet, a suicidal poet—all these terms have been used (and are still being used) in attempts to define and explain Sylvia Plath’s writing. Some critics have seen her as schizoid, carrier of a death wish that they perceive in everything she ever wrote. Others have seen her as the victim of male brutality, destroyed by a faithless husband, having been undermined by an ambitious mother, overcompensating for her own inadequate marriage. There will no doubt be other equally extravagant ‘explanations’ of her writing in the future, since, like the works of Keats, with whom she shares the dubious honour of having died young, her writing does not slot easily into categories and headings.
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Notes
Ted Hughes, note in Encounter. October 1963.
A. Alvarez, The Savage God (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), pp. 28–29.
Sylvia Plath is included in the section entitled ‘Where Are the Women Playwrights?’ in Women in American Theatre, eds Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins (New York, Crown Publishers, 1981).
Eileen Aird, Sylvia Plath (London, Oliver and Boyd, 1973), p. 14.
Susan R. Van Dyne, ‘More Terrible Than She Ever Was’, ‘The Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems’ in Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Boston, G. K. Hall and Co., 1984), pp. 154–70.
Anne Cluysenaar, ‘Post-culture: Pre-Culture?’ in British Poetry Since 1960: A Critical Survey, eds Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop (Oxford, Carcanet Press, 1972), pp. 219–21.
Margaret Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Urbana, Chicago, London, University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 169.
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© 1987 Susan Bassnett
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Bassnett, S. (1987). The Struggle to Survive through Writing. In: Sylvia Plath. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18600-6_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18600-6_5
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