Word: middlebrooks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bristles at such adoration, but if he were in my shoes, he'd understand the appreciation and love. With so much evil in the world, humanity needs poets like Dylan who challenge us to think beyond the morass of banality that defines most of the human experience. Jeffrey Van Middlebrook PACIFIC GROVE, CALIF...
Plath and Hughes were wed just four months after they met, and the marriage burned fast and hot. Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband (Viking; 361 pages) takes us inside the tight, intense feedback loop of two obsessive, competitive writers who read and critiqued each other's work fresh from the typewriter. In time, the intensity turned claustrophobic for Hughes. He began an affair with another woman, and the couple separated. But in the agonizing aftermath of their marriage, Plath found a new and devastatingly powerful voice, the voice of "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy" and the other towering, terrifying poems that would...
Plath's story has been told many times--most recently in a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow--but Middlebrook's biography is the first to draw on the papers Hughes left after his death in 1998. Her goal is to clarify his side of the story and to some extent to exonerate him. It's an uphill battle. Plath could certainly be difficult, and unquestionably the presence of Hughes, a major poet in his own right, accelerated Plath's development as a writer. But nothing in Her Husband will settle the question of whether Hughes exacerbated or merely failed to stem...