Plath and Hughes Critic Flashcards
Aird
the world of crossing the water ‘remains in a private fantasy world although it is visually and verbally attractive
Jonathan Bate Heptonstall
“life and death, struggle and rebirth, but also the ache of loss”
Eavan Boland
[Plath] did something radical to the nature poem. She stopped addressing nature and she became it.-
Stephen Gould Axelrod
Plath’s poems contain an ‘exposure of material meant to be taken as personal …her poems seethe with anger, hope, desire and disappointment…Plath is able to construct breathtaking images of the human psyche and body’ -
andrew spacey
Hughes “often portrayed nature as a battleground, with violent struggle, blood and death”.
sandie byrne
‘The thistles become reincarnations of Vikings”
Bates Confessional poet
‘the true confessional poet embodies the trauma of the age within their own psychological torment.’
Tim Kendall
“History is cyclical and therefore repetitive”
Jonathan Bates Plath
‘Sylvia, a trapped animal brought fresh from the shining shore of the New World and confined in Yorkshire cold, Yorkshire grime, Yorkshire ways she does not really understand.
Jonathan Bates Plath and Hughes relationship
Love-bites: for Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound.’
Michiko Kakutani
‘That is how the late poet Ted Hughes is best known today. Not as England’s former poet laureate or as the author of such estimable collections as “Lupercal” or “Crow,” but as Sylvia Plath’s husband, whose infidelity helped spur her to grief and suicide’
Bates Domestic life
a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed’.
