Chaucer and Plath + Hughes Critics

Ackroyd on Chaucer shifting the blame

“He chooses to hide behind words […] he shifts the blame”

Ackroyd on Chaucer painting a portrait of piety and the virtues of female suffering

“A portrait of late medieval piety which extolled the virtues of female suffering”

Ackroyd on the larger theme of the poem - social order

“takes as its larger theme the nature of a threatened and disrupted social order”

Burrow on January’s presentation

“presented as pathetic, absurd, and repulsive”

Davidson on Chaucer deflecting May’s blame

“Chaucer is deflecting blame from May onto January”

Shores

“cynical condemnation of courtly convention”

Beidler on January’s folly - sight

“January’s folly is that he sees what he wants to see, rather than what is actually before him”

Ackroyd on the notion of authority

“The whole notation of authority seems to be parodied in this poem”

Ackroyd on Chaucer’s marriage

“a career marriage in around 1366”

“never mentioned her death in any public way, except he declared his intention never to remarry”

Brunner on Lombardy combining wealth and poverty

“notorious for its brothels […] combining temporal and financial wealth with moral and spiritual poverty”

Brunner on characters dealing with marriage

“characters bargain, trade and deal their way through marriage”

Brunner on May being livestock

“She is simply another piece of livestock, bought to fulfil a specific sexual and procreative purpose”

King on astrology in the poem

“Astrological detail […] giving it a moralised universal meaning: the marriage of old age and youth is an unnatural conjunction”

Jones on the polyphony of voices

“Explodes the idea of an authoritative voice […] dizzying array of pilgrim voices”

Jones on the garden as trapping

“Enclosed, contained even claustrophobic spaces”

Jones on the garden - spying

“Locations of surveillance and eavesdropping”

Jones on the garden and women metaphorically and socially

“Metaphorically, they represented the female body itself; socially, they were associated with ludic, female-based or mixed-sex”

Thorne on January’s manipulation of religious authority

“religious authority to his own selfish purposes […] adds to our sense of his delusion”

"Plath had a genuine and disconcerting ambivalence about living" - Warren

living

"He saw rural England as his 'sub-culture' - the place he knew best, the source of his literary voice" - Bate

rural england

"Full of life and colour even when the tone is dark and comfortless" - Warren

Plath tone

"Oblivion is a state which is sought actively" - Warren

Plath actively seeks

"Plath claims against Hughes' conviction that nature is anti-human" - Gifford

What does Plath claim

"I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations possible in life. And I am horribly limited" - Journals

What does Plath want to do in life

"Full of energy connecting him to the vital forces of the universe" - Bate

Hughes connected to universe

"He himself was a part of the landscape: elemental, unchangeable" - Bate

He was part of nature

"The natural world often seems to reflect the speaker's mood vividly" - Warren

what does the natural world reflect in her poetry

"A spokesperson for the hidden and violent beings we partly are" - McCraig

What is Hughes a spokesperson of

"Vengeful and masochistic speakers" - Warren

What are the speakers of Plath's poetry like

"a desire to escape from the narrow, constricting limits of female identity" - Warren

what did Plath want to escape

"Plath seemed to have metaphorically killed off all the fathers that had silenced and oppressed generations of women" - Clark

Who did Plath metaphorically kill off

"I love my children but want my own life" - Journals

Children and life

"The subordination of humankind to the power of the earth is one of the unifying themes of the volume" - Bate

What is one of the unifying themes of the volume

"A northern working-class voice with a sensitivity to the raw forces of nature" - Bate

What voice did he have and what was it sensitive to

"Hughes provides a sensitive critique of a male world where women occupy an uneasy place" - Brain

What does Hughes provide a sensitive critique of

"It is impossible that anyone could have been more in love with life, or more capable of happiness than she was" - Bate

What was it impossible plath could have been more in love with and more capable of

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