Word: plathe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
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...
...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...