Word: plath
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Anti-sexual and suicidal, female American poets often fall into the wrong hands. As teenagers we read Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and even Emily Dickinson with hungry self-identification, and then as teen angst recedes we discard them. In high school, I was assigned Plath at about the same time I discovered Tori Amos, and, like many, I clung onto both of them like a die hard indie fan. But then, growing up, realizing we demanded odd things of love, our parents and our world, we tend to brush off these brilliant-brave complainers as if their long struggles with...
DIED. TED HUGHES, 68, British poet laureate whose reputation both waned and waxed as a result of his stormy marriage to tormented American poet Sylvia Plath; after an 18-month fight with cancer; in London. Blamed by many for Plath's 1963 suicide, Hughes earlier this year published Birthday Letters, a collection of intense poems that described his relationship with Plath. It helped clear the air and won him a torrent of praise. Acclaimed for his unsentimental poetry filled with violent images of nature, Hughes also wrote a number of poems and stories for children...
...Fans were shocked, but unsurprised that he had chosen to keep the illness to himself. This was, after all, a man who struggled quietly for 35 years with the emotions bequeathed to him by the suicide of his first wife, the tortured American poet Sylvia Plath. His refusal to speak out about the 1963 incident in which Plath gassed herself after Hughes left her for another woman had led many to presume that he was hard-hearted, if not a murderer (and they kept hacking his name off her Yorkshire gravestone). That was until the sudden and unassuming launch...
...write? And although Hughes denies being consciously influenced by the work of her mother and father, traces from both are easy to see. Her mother's violent, lacerating imagery appears in a poem called "Hysterectomy": "My disease will be stripped out/ Like the rotten lining of a leather coat." Plath's angry confessional tone is echoed in "Granny": "You loved me not, just saw/ A copy of the face/ You gave birth to." In "Readers," Hughes rails at those who have made a cult out of her mother: "They turned her over like meat on coals/ To find the secrets...
Such poems emit a screechiness that Plath's, at their most powerful, avoided. Hughes is more successful when she turns her attention, as her father has done so brilliantly, to the natural world. Here is a fox: "Half grown/ His small feet black as matchheads." Here is a bush fire that consumed much of her property in Wooroloo: "It began with a small red spot/ That flowered in the floorboards,/ Its anemone danced, and the music/ Was the crack of wood applauding." Such moments suggest that poets can be born as well as made...