Hughes and Plath Criticism

Diane Purkiss, on Daddy and confessional poetry

“Plath has an ironic take on the whole Confessional genre in which she is also participating”

Diane Purkiss, on Daddy

Daddy “strip[s] away” the “civilised veneer” between a toddler’s capacity for resentment and the civilised veneer of adulthood

Plath is “turning the nursery rhyme violence back on the parent”

Diane Purkiss, on Plath and motherhood

Plath “opens a window into maternal love not just as a duty, but as a positive passion”

Diane Purkiss, on Plath’s politics

“These are not just anthems for doomed youth, they are anthems for everybody as doomed youth”

Plath, on natural subjects

“absolute gifts” to children with no “interior experiences to write about”

Plath, on English poetry

“in a bit of a straitjacket”

“I am not very genteel, and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold”

English focus on “practical” and “historical criticism” is “almost paralysing”

Plath, on emotional experiences

“I think my poems come immediately out of sensuous and emotional experiences"

“I believe one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying […] with an informed and intelligent mind”

Plath, on personal writing

Poetry should not be a “shut-box and mirror-looking, narcissistic experience […] it should be relevant to larger things”

Plath, on phonetics

“whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself”

Plath, on Nick and the Candlestick

“A mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world’s ill, does redeem her share of it”

Brita Lindenberg-Seyersted, on Plath’s imagery

“Images of landscapes and animals are consistently turned into metaphors for the human intruder’s feeling of being insignificant and exposed”

Tim Kendall, on ‘Among the Narcissi’

“The poem may at first seem more hopeful, but reference to the ‘man mending’ fails to convince”

Hughes, on his father

His father “managed to convey the horror” of war “so nakedly it tortured me”

Hughes, on Crow

the character uses “super simple, super ugly language”

“The Crow is another word for […] everything extracted from a beast when it is gutted.”

Hughes, on mortality

“What excites my imagination is the war between vitality and death”

Hughes, on surroundings

Calder Valley was a “tuning fork” for his poetry

Jeffrey Meyers, on Hughes’ generational trauma

War was a “lifelong obsession” as a result of his father’s “trauma and survivor’s guilt” being “passed on to Hughes as a child”

Jeffrey Meyers, on killing

He “combined the instinct to kill of fierce birds with the instinct of men in war”

Simon Armitage, on ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’

the poem “creates an equilibrium between the mature, full moon, and the waxing, little Frieda”

Armitage, on Calder Valley

the “anthropology, religion, natural history, and geography” of the location acted as a “model for nearly all of his future work”

Dennis Walder, on Crow

the collection is a “ransacking” of other cultures, with Hughes “dipping into whatever serves his purpose”

Walder, on Hawk Roosting

“you have to decide for yourself whether the poem can be understood to glorify fascist militarism”

Leonard Scigaj, on Wodwo

poems of “recurring feuds and destructiveness”; Her Husband is a domesticated version of this

Edward Lucie-Smith, on British poets after modernism

British poets after modernism were “bold enough to flaunt their own conservatism” and “seemed to look upon a declared hostility to modernism as being in itself a form of innovation”