Word: plath
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Nonetheless, a number of angry plaintiffs in recent years have brought libel suits charging that they were represented, and misrepresented, by fictional characters in stories, novels and films. The latest such suit, against the film version of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar, ended last week with a court-endorsed settlement that sent a cautionary and somewhat paradoxical message: when you make things up, be sure to tell the truth...
...contended that she was the model for Joan Gilling, a central character in both the book and the movie. Claiming that the film defamed and humiliated her by presenting Gilling as a suicidal lesbian, she brought suit in a Boston federal court. The 14 individual and corporate defendants included Plath's widower, the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who sold the movie rights of her novel for $60,000, as well as the filmmakers and two television companies that showed the movie, CBS and Time Inc.'s Home Box Office...
...disclosures, the introspections and secret desires give diaries their special appeal. This assemblage compounds the interest; reading it is like screening other people's dreams--at once intriguing and familiar. For Sylvia Plath's need to write in her notebook when she is "at wits' end, in a cul-de- sac. Never when I am happy" is not unique to depressed poets. Lord Byron notes, "Clock strikes--going out to make love. Somewhat perilous, but not disagreeable." Boswell reports, "I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such...
...technique and the recurrent inattention to poetic technique that characterizes the poets of bad surrealism. Clumsy diction can illustrate the disintegration of consciousness and some poets even use language as a weapon against itself, as James Wright, Galway Kinnell, and Robert Bly do at times. And Williamson rightly praises Plath for the extraordinary lyricism of her poetry. The chapter on the attempt by some poets to destroy language leaves one question unanswered: if the poets under consideration find language such an inadequate tool, why don't they stop writing? The answer, with which Williamson would perhaps disagree, may be that...
...tendency has hastened poetry's tragic descent into obscurity, away from mainstream culture. Williamson praises Tillinghast's early poetry for its gentle irony, a quality which that poet has refined to great advantage in his more recent work. But he almost completely ignores the wonderful humor in most of Plath's poetry--a humor that saves her poetry from becoming an obsessive mythology of self-hatred. A sense of playfulness is the crucial element lacking in much personal poetry as well as other contemporary poetry. And we are surely lost if the poets have forgotten how to play