Plath-Hughes Criticism

Maudlin

'I get something of a prayer in saying it'- Plath

Winter Trees/ Crossing the Water/Wuthering Heights

Plath sees landscapes as 'extensions of her body'- Jon Rosenblatt

Lesbos

'rage and madness as a protest against inauthenticity, in this case masks of femininity that stifle female creativity'- Deborah Nelson

Morning Song

the baby as 'uniquely liberated'- Diane Middlebrook

the Stones

'turns the landscape into a metaphor for the human intruder's feelings of being insignificant and exposed' -Lindber-Seyersted

Cut

Plath 'makes it impossible to assign guilt or claim innocence for the nation'- Deborah Nelson

Nick and the Candlestick

'threatening the mother and child of Christian iconography'- Tim Kendall

Crossing the Water

'she has been travelling underground like Osiris'- Hughes

Full Moon and Little Frieda

''Morning Song' inspired Hughes' own 'Full Moon and Little Frieda''- Diane Middlebrook

October Dawn

'allegiance to 'nature' and suspicion of if not hostility to 'culture''- Neil Roberts

the Horses

calder valley as 'tuning fork'- Hughes

Crow poems

'racking moment of smashing everything to pieces'- Holbrook

Emily Bronte

Hughes viewed 'Bronte's life as inseparable from a dark affinity to natural energies'- Dinah Birch

Her Husband

'willingness to reconnect poetry to its deep and dark sources'- Hibbett

Wodwo

'little larval being without shape or qualities who finds himself alive in this world at any time'- Hughes

the Jaguar

Hughesian sublime produced through 'close encounters with primal energy'- Dwight Eddins