Word: plath
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...debate over the validity of drawing on private experiences as source material for poetry continues: Hamilton illustrates its endurance by raising an interesting comparison between Lowell and his student Sylvia Plath. Plath's line "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through" in her 1962 poem "Daddy," Hamilton suggests, was inspired by Lowell's long poem The Mills of the Kavanaughs, with its line "You are a bastard, Michael, aren't you? Nein." In fact, Lowell was largely responsible for the freedom and Plath and other modern poets enjoyed to include material from their private lives in their...
...those who never saw Robert Lowell on the occasions when he was out of his mind, the best poet of his generation seemed almost too proper a Bostonian. Students in his classroom at Boston University during the '50s (including Sylvia Plath) found him "diffident" and "reserved." His "mild, myopic manner" hardly placed him in the company of the wild men of letters, like his friends Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman. But Lowell, as the English poet-critic Ian Hamilton reveals in this melancholy biography, was the wildest of them...
...classics, and all have been singled out by public schools or libraries-but not for praise. In fact, these distinguished titles all appear on some current list or other of banned books: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison's Invisible. Man, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, P.L Travers' Mary Poppins and The American Heritage Dictionary...
...nuncio to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Since its founding in 1927, the Barbizon had been one of the few places in Gomorrah-on-Hudson where a girl could take her virtue to bed and rest assured that it would still be there next morning. As the late Sylvia Plath wrote of the Barbizon in The Bell Jar-she called it the Amazon-the hotel was a place "for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents who wanted to be sure their daughters would be living where men couldn't get at them...
With Part Of Nature, Part Of Us, Helen Vendler confirms the idea that writing is as much a process of the critical faculties as the creative. Her reviews of Eliot, Lowell, Merrill, Penn Warren, Auden, Plath, O'Hara and many others are poems in themselves, or at least poetic testimonies to the major poets of our time. Vendler's collection ought to be enduring in the libraries of American literary criticism, not only for its intellectual depth, but its expression of excitement and comprehension...