Plath & Hughes: Critics & Terminology

Newman

Newman

“In many instances, it is nature who personifies [Plath].”

McClanahan

“A raving avenger of womanhood and innocence.”

Lindberg

“Nature is here in a somewhat macabre fashion to aestheticise death”.

Neil Roberts

Hughes’ Thought-Fox is “representative of the poet’s hidden self, the self from which his poetry comes.”

Varma

In View of a Pig, the pig is “inactive alongwith the depiction of the failure of the poet.”

Middlebrook

“Hughes and Plath write from one shared mind.”

Bate

"Plath was a symbolic artist persistently misread as a confessional one." 

Kinsella

Hughes “pushes the sublime into the brutal”

Gifford

Hughes' believes that poetry has become the secular healing substitute for organized religion

Norton

“Hughes’ poems tended to view through the eye of the predator, Plath’s through the eyes of the victim”

Uroff

“Hughes appears more fascinated with death and deadliness than does Plath”

McClanahan (Ariel)

“In Ariel, the everyday incidents of living are transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet.”

Heather Clark

Hughes “was not venerating the fascist mind-set – he was exposing it, and exploring its traces in ourselves”.

Margaret Rees

Plath “let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears.”

Tim Kendall

“The landscapes gradually become the mindscapes and bodyscapes — or at least, the reader can no longer tell the difference.”

Steven Gould Axelrod

The mirror becomes “an agent of anxious narcissism”

Heather Clark on “Wind”

It “thwarts any human attempt to ‘experience’ its awesome force.”

How did Hughes describe Wodwo?

A “descent into destruction”

Calvin Bedient

“Crow is the croak of nihilism itself.”

David Sutton

FMALF is “a poem about primal wonder … reciprocated wonder on the part of the universe”

Brian Cox

In Crow, “Hughes’ intoxication with violence has been overtaken by disgust.”

Define the “stream-of-consciousness” technique

This is supposed to replicate the thought-process of a poem’s speaker rather than a well-articulated verse typical of poetry. It will often include incomplete ideas, unusual syntax, rough grammar, and sensory impressions.

What is a dramatic monologue?

A dramatic monologue is an extended speech or narrative presented by the speaker in which they inadvertantly reveal aspects of their own character while describing other situations/events

What is free verse poetry?

Poetry with no set rhyme or rhythm. Plath and Hughes both tend to prefer free verse.

Sarah Wimbush

Part of the appeal of wind is how it “serves aa a metaphor for rocky relationships, undoubtedly Hughes’ own”