critical quotation poetry Flashcards
Bentley on Alvarez on Hughes
“Alvarez places Hughes in the context of an age of psychoanalysis, an age coming to terms with new revelations about the Holocaust.”
Hughes on violence
Hughes defines two types of violence: 1. Negative – the idea of violation or sacrilege 2. Positive – a reaction to the first: “a life-bringing assertion of sacred law which demolishes a force that oppressed and violated it”.
Heaney on Hughes
“Hughes’ voice is in rebellion against a certain kind of demeaned mannerly voice… those of literate English middle-class culture”
Hong on Hughes and Yung
“Influenced by Jung, Hughes felt deeply about ‘the separation of the two psychic halves’ and regarded it as a basic human condition.
Hong on Hughes and animal power
“a tension between the poet’s admiration for the animal power and his fear of it”
Middlebrook on Plath and Hughes
“a relationship of call and response”
Uroff on Plath and Hughes and life
“share a view of poetry as a raid on the inner life”
Wurst on Plath
“Plath’s deification of her husband played into…her life-long dread of her own poetic sterility”
Brandes on Crow
“crisis is the catalyst for much of Hughes work and Crow is a response to both personal and public crisis”
Roberts on Hughes and history
For Hughes “two decisive moments of English history are the Civil War and the First World War. The Civil War is central to what might be called his ideological construction of English history, the progressive displacement of the sacred and the feminine by the forces of patriarchal monotheism and scientific rationality. The First World War is central to his personal formation.”
Roberts on Hughes and industry
“industry like war reduces the workers to replaceable functions, alienating them from their own humanity”
Vendler on Plath
“All of nature exists only as a vehicle for Plath’s sensibility…we ask whether there ever was a genuine sense of something existing that was not herself”
Perloff on France
“Plath’s limitations emerge most clearly when she tries to make forays into the larger world”
Brain on Plath
“Elm is one of the many poems in which Plath explores the consequences of isolation, and argues against the impulse to hold oneself separate from the rest of the world… Transatlantic poems such as Cut dramatize the hybridity of any national identity through disorientations of place, self and language. Like other postmodern interpenetrations – for instance between genres… - Plath’s interpenetrations between body and ecosystem are often concomitant with intersections between femininity and masculinity, or between America and Europe.”
Van Dyne on Plath
“beguiled by constructions of femininity”
Annas on Plath
“[Cut and Munich Mannequins contain] recurring metaphors of fragmentation and reification – the abstraction of the individual- [which] in Plath’s late poetry are socially and historically based.” / Annas reads the hospital as a metaphor for contemporary society expressing “impersonality, depersonalisation, loss of control of one’s own body, sterility and flatness.”
Ostriker on Plath
“…another poem of Emily Dickinson’s, one which begins “The heart asks pleasure first” and concludes with “the liberty to die”. In that nutshell rests the connection between American Narcissism and American self-destructiveness… Plath’s poetry is a withering into the truth of a national predicament.”
Uroff on Plath and Hughes and the female
“In creating the myth of the vengeful female who rises against her oppressors, Plath has available as an aid Hughes’ own myth of enraged and captive energies, and his own image of the creative-destructive female”
Eagleton on Wuthering Heights
(In Wuthering Heights) “the monetary imagery of the final lines, while appearing to domesticate nature, in fact transmutes it to a commodity, trivialising and distancing it in the act of seeming to appropriate it to human concerns”
Kendall on Plath and Moon
“Instead of Christian paraphernalia the moon is worshipped, but possesses a kinship which must be acknowledged”
