Word: plath
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Just because connoisseurs of poetry rarely read the National Enquirer doesn't mean they don't crave sensationalism. Witness the enduring legend of Sylvia Plath more than three decades after the writer's death. Certainly Plath's reputation as a fierce, accomplished poet has endured, but it is the shocking story of her life that really fascinates the literary public...
...details of Plath's suicide have assumed totemic significance for a cult of followers who regard her as St. Sylvia, the high priestess of suffering. On Feb. 11, 1963, she put her head in a gas oven in her London apartment as her two children, for whom she had left glasses of milk and a plate of bread and butter, slept in a nearby bedroom. Plath's husband Ted Hughes, a great poet who is now England's poet laureate, had left her months earlier for another woman. Before her death, few had ever heard of the 30-year...
...Sylvia Plath were alive today, she would be a venerable 61 years old. (Given the shift in the times, she also might be on Prozac.) But the poet who dies young is remembered in her youthful glory, a literary James Dean. Attention to Plath's life has been paid in inverse proportion to its brevity: five exhaustive biographies have been written about her. In addition, everyone who ever had lunch with Plath has seemingly felt compelled to write a memoir...
DIED. AURELIA SCHOBER PLATH, 87, educator and editor; in Needham, Massachusetts. The Boston-born mother of poet Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Plath compiled Letters Home, a collection of her daughter's correspondence from 1950 until Sylvia's suicide in 1963. Published in 1975, Letters Home revealed a writer torn by insecurity, ambition -- and a heartbreaking need to please her mother. The book was eventually adapted for the stage...
...poetry's power, which began when she took down an anthology of American verse from the bookshelf in her family's home in Akron. After that, her otherwise strict parents made no attempt to censor what she read, and she read everything from Gone With the Wind to Sylvia Plath. "I remember reading ((Plath's)) poem Daddy, which ends, 'Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through,' " says Dove. "I realized that you don't have to be polite in poetry, and I couldn't get enough of it after that...