Plath and Hughes Crit and Context

Jennifer Ryan Bryant - Ariel general collection quotes

• domestic

• personal and poetic

• “draws our attention to tropes that recur across poetic situations” - Poppies in Oct, Lesbos, Ariel Lady Godiva

• concerned with the role that “personal histories play in shaping the poetic metaphor” - confessionalism, ars poetica, how patriarchy informs her poetry

• “the speaker’s desire to resist conventional domesticity results in a literal fragmentation of the narrated lines” - Ariel, Lesbos

• Repetition allows plath to “recreate the impact that the story’s emotions have on its participants and to describe its material elements”

among the narc crit

‘The poem may at first seem more hopeful, but reference to ‘the man mending’ fails to convince’ - Tim Kendall

hughes personal - his own quotes

as an imaginative writer, my only capital is my life

Deborah nelson on plath and patriarchy

‘produces a damning critique of patriarchal institutions’

plath and feminity

‘tends to figure feminity as abject’ - britzolakis

form and plath

‘the chaotic look affects her rawness’ - trinidad

plath on the ocean and critical quotes about this

‘my father died, we moved inland’

‘my vision of the sea is the clearest thing i own’

Sea as a recurring ‘metaphor for yearning for reunification with her lost father’ (glyn austen)

tempest impact on her

sea imagery and attempted drowning followed by visit to father’s grave in Bell Jar

Heather Clark on Plath and Hughes together

• Plath and Hughes “could not help borrowing images, cadences, even words” from each others’ work

moon and the yew tree

• ‘their disjunctive images, repeated lines and words, and uncommon vocabulary function as metonyms for her radical refashioning of the everyday world’

• jennider ryan-bryant

motherhood and ars poetica

• Plath - “analogies between motherhood and writerly creation” - link to You’re and paintbrush metaphor in full moon and little frieda

• jennifer ryan-bryant

Ryan-Bryant on Ariel itself

• “Ambiguous energy” - of the poem ariel

Neil roberts on Crow - universality

• crow as an “epic folk tale” - contrast Hughes’ universality with Plath’s confessionalism

• cont: shamanism, anthropology, white goddess

Ryan-Byant on Crow

• “Like plath’s narrator, Crow attempts to reimagine or remake his physical surroundings, but the result is always chaos”

Kendall on Among the Narcissi

• ‘The poem may at first seem more hopeful, but reference to ‘the man mending’ fails to convince’ - Tim Kendall

Heather Clarke on Full fathom five and other poems

• Clarke considers ‘Full Fathom Five’ as “an important thematic cursor” to Plath’s later “paternal elegies”, like ‘Colossus’ and ‘Daddy’.

FUll Fathom Five (can use for other poems) - personal and not

• “This blend of personal subject matter and cultural-mythical material” - Peter Lowe - link to Hughes’ shamanism

• also plath - personal experience should not be a ‘shut-box’

Plath and water imagery crit x2

• “Water is a recurrent motif in Plath, symbolising the mysterious allure of death: it is as if she yearns to drown in the strangely appealing depths of the ocean, to find a sense of completeness and solidarity with the dead which eluded her in living” - Glyn Austen

  “submersion in water provides for her the most potent of metaphors for that yearning for reunification with the lost father” - Glyn Austen - compare her biographical reading with Jaqueline Rose’s reading of Plath as a fantasy

Jaqueline Rose on final line of Daddy

• "ambiguous triumphalism"

• jaqueline rose

Purkiss on Daddy and confessionalism

‘Daddy’ is “...an ironic take on the whole confessional genre in which she is also participating”. It is confessional “but in a very controlled way”.

Steiner on Daddy

Guernica of modern poetry

Morning Song and confessionalism

“misinterpreted as confessional”

greg johnson

Jo Gill on FMaLF and MS - and Plath and hughes more generally together

Jo Gil argues that 'Full Moon and Little Frieda' was a "further response" to 'Morning Song', suggesting that "[Hughes and Plath's] poems should be read together as a raid and counter raid, gathering intensity as they developed."

Expansion on the idea of a "raid" = Hughes fighting back against they way in which Plath has defined parenthood - competition between romantic and realist attitudes - two perspectives compete (female and privileged male) - Plath's speaker has to compete more due to the female gaze and its lack of importance to many - idea of a patriarchal society at the time - conforming vs subverting their expectations.

Jo Gill

Marjorie Perloff on Ariel

There was no room for wise passiveness in her response to nature; rather, she had to conquer it

Clarke on Plath’s motherhood poems - 2 quotes

• “Plath is often at her best when writing about her children, but she is never at ease.” - you’re creative energies but anxiety

• “She pioneered the poetry of motherhood and challenged the male Romantic notion that the moorland outside her door was more sublime than her baby’s nursery.” -

Clarke on Plath and Hughes’ view of British poetry

“They felt British poetry was at a low point, full of destructive gentility, and they were determined to shock it out of submission.”

PLath’s style - less confessional- use for colour, figurative imagery, landscape, abstract

‘her aesthetic impulse was more surrealist than confessional.’ - figurative imagery, landscape in moon and yew tree, colour, ariel transcendant

heather clarke

Lowell Ariel preface

In the preface to the posthumous collection Ariel, Robert Lowell described Plath’s later poems as akin to “playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder”

Plath’s cult following not a vibe think lana del ray vinyl lolitacore idolatry of play

“either a woman author isn’t studied, or studying her is reduced to an act of misplaced religious fanaticism.” - Heilbrun

Jaqueline Rose on Plath

1. unsettles

2. representations

3. fantasy

What interests Jaqueline Rose ‘most strongly is the circulation of fantasy in her texts’ - Lady Godiva, desire for transformation, full fathom five, daddy

Rose: ‘Plath regularly unsettles certainties of language, identity, sexuality’ - life and death blurring, lesbos, subversion of motherhood, strange images in You’re

Rose: ‘what we are dealing with is not plath herself but her representations’ - ie. don’t be reductive when reading Plath - literary self created

Rose: ‘Plath is a fantasy, she writes fantasy’

PLath’s art and tragedy - aestheticisation of pain

• “her tragedy is offered to us as a near-perfect work of art” - Oates - use to look at ars poetica and pain in Crow as well

• pain as part of poetic process - also aestheticization of pain with flower imagery!

otto and Tulips

• Glyn Austen: “Otto Plath is an ever-present spectre in Plath's poems.”

• Tulips: “the beguiling lure of self-abandonment” “The ultimate communion with the divine is, here, the oblivion of death”

• glyn austen

Dennis Walder on Crow

• composed of the scraps of folklore, myth and religion

• A “ransacking” of other cultures - “dipping into whatever serves his purpose” - link to Daddy

Hughes Hawk in rain 57 intro (life and death context)

What excites my imagination is the war between vitality and death

Andy Armitage on HUghes’ early poems -

• “Hughes’s preoccupation with the neglected inner life is apparent in his early poems through the observation of animals that embody the, often violent, elemental energies of nature.” - A. Armitage

• basically Hawk collection animals represent sociatal stagnace, lethargy and lack of creativity ‘preoccupation with neglected inner life’

Andy Armitage on Hughes by the time of Crow

“...by the time of Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970), his poetry had evolved into a loose and stark mythic surrealism.” - A. Armitage

On a personal level, however, Hughes appears to have used Crow as a way to come to terms with his feelings of guilt after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. As the consummate survivor, Crow is ‘stronger than death’ (THC.219) and after enduring the most apocalyptic of disasters, he is typically driven by an instinctual urge to ‘start searching for something to eat’ (THC.209).” - A. Armitage

Jarold Ramsay on Crow

• “The central impulse of the Crow poems is certainly an ingenious and unrelenting subversion of the Christian mythos” - Jarold Ramsey - Plath’s poems do this, comp with mock-catechims in EaWD

• Trickster figure in crow “serves as a transformer, finding the world to be seriously incomplete, disordered” - Jarold Ramsey - domestic in PLath’s poems

Dennis Walder on Hughes’ war poetry

• Hughes was a “war poet at one remove, writing out of the impact of memory” - link to impact on memory for Plath in Daddy

Jeffrey Myers on Hughes’ fixation with war

• War was “a lifelong obsession” for Hughes; “...his father’s trauma and survivor’s guilt, passed on to Hughes as a child, continued to torment his life and influence his art.” - Jeffrey Meyers

• Hughes’s account—beginning with the adverb “Suddenly” and repeating the participle “running”—captures the excitement, confusion, and terror of battle. - Myers

  Like Owen, Hughes portrayed the sufferings at the front as vividly and horrifically as possible. The cynical dismissal of king and country, used to justify the bloodshed, was also influenced by Owen’s furious quotation of Horace’s “old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori”

Hughes intro to a Keith Douglas collection - but also applicable to himself

“war was his ideal subject: the burning away of all human pretensions in the ray cast by death.”

Neil Roberts on Hawk Roosting

Hawk is a hybrid creation, in which the concept of a splendid, innocent natural creature is shadowed by something more human and sinister

link to ‘lovepet’ and also ‘tulips

What did Chen Hong call hughes?

• a shaman

What is the thought fox for Chen Hong?

• a totem or shamanic animal with the power to move freely out of its own physical existence into the spiritual/mythic realm whilst communicated as a textual force from beyond, yet obviously expressed within, human culture

What tension did RIchard webster locate in the Thought Fox?

• Richard Webster detected a ‘conflict of sensibility’ in the poem, a tension between ‘the extraordinary sensuous delicacy’ of the fox image and ‘the predatory impulse’ which he sees in the poet’s attempt to capture the animal in the process of poetic creation

• conflict of sensibility

Chen Hong on moment of liberation in Jaguar

• Facing the jaguar as if it were ‘a dream’, the crowd seems to be penetrated by ‘the drills of his eyes’, just as the ‘prison darkness’ is drilled through. The dreamy moment thus becomes the moment when the closed door to the inner world of the crowd, which we may understand as the collective unconscious of human beings, opens temporarily up to forces of the outer world.

• link to Ariel

Edwin Muir on Jaguar

• ‘The images are so vivid that a symbolic meaning springs from them, whether it was intended to be there or not.’ - Edwin Muir

• “Admirable violence” - Edwin Muir

Wind - Al Alvarez

“Explosive” verb choices (A.Alvarez)

JOnathan Bate on HUghes - use for life and death point

• “Ted Hughes is our poet of light, but also of darkness. Of fresh water but also of polluted places. Of living life to the full, but also of death.” - Jonathan Bate

Hughes and death/violence #malfi

• his instinctive taste for violence

• death was the dominant theme of the most bloody and horrific poetry since John Webster’

• jeffrey MYERS

Alan Bleakley on HUghes’ imagination

• animalizing imagination

Keith Sagar - Hughes and natural world

• Hughes presents ‘the human world and natural world at one with each other’

Simon armitage on Hughes poems

many of his poems are unembarrassed shamanic flights of fancy into the spirit-world, excursions to the ‘other side’, where he might properly inhabit the nature of his subject

Derek Walcott and Eagleton on Hughes as impersonal

Hughes has long been associated with the impersonal, and on various grounds.. praised by Derek Walcott for reducing the "I," criticized by Terry Eagleton for a lack of self-reflectivity.