Word: plath
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...Confessional poetry" is one of these ubiquitous terms. It became current when Robert Lowell published his highly autobiographical The Dolphin, and widespread with Sylvia Plath's spectacularly introspective Ariel. Now an acceptable part of the critic's vocabulary, confessional poetry generally refers refers to highly autobiographical poetry. At its worst, confessional poetry is little more than a laundry list of personal grievances. But many excellent poets have been unfairly tagged with this label and its attendant associations of sloppiness and whining. Because confessional poetry has not been sufficiently defined as a genre, critics judge the poetry only by blurry, often...
...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
Libby begins his study by considering T.S. Eliot 'II, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, whose works staked out much of the turf that later poets have explored. He then discusses these later poets, with a chapter each on Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, and W.S. Merwin, emphasizing their continuing involvement with the mysticism that the older poets had resurrected from medieval times...
Libby says that the most misinterpreted use of death arises in Plath's poetry. Her 1963 suicide more than almost anything else, publicized the preoccupation with death in poetry. But critical fascination with psychoanalysis, combined with the shaliownes of popular opinion, reduced the accepted view of Plath's overwhelming irony and lostered further misconceptions Libby's reasessment of Plath does not lapse into sensationalism Her poetry, he argues, concerns itself more with the nature of the mother daughter relationship than with an impersonal death. In the process of exploring the idea of a mother. Plath discovered and dramatized Carl Jung...