Hughes + Plath Flashcards

(27 cards)

1
Q

Bate - purpose of poetry

A

‘For Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; For Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound”

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2
Q

Bate - time together

A

“They were barely apart, day or night, from the summer of 1956 to the autumn of 1963”

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3
Q

Bate - Hughes Natural world

A

“a boy completely at home on the land and in the landscape”

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4
Q

Holbrook - aim of plath’s poetry

A

“Plath’s poetry is a psychotic testimony to her own mental disorder”

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5
Q

Gifford - relationship between poets

A

‘Plath and Hughes’ poetry is reciprocal and cross-pollinated’

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6
Q

McClanahan - psyhic spaces

A

‘Plath’s poetry focuses on the blur between mindscape and landscape’

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7
Q

Kirwan - Plath’s faith

A

‘struggle with faith rather than a rejection of it.’

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8
Q

Gail Crowther

A

‘Reluctant atheist’

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9
Q

Al Alvarez - Death

A

“Plath’s art left her no direction except death”

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10
Q

Armitage - Fox

A

“Fox as an icon of inspiration”

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11
Q

Clark - why did plath write

A

Writing was not something that Sylvia did to please others, but to please herself - as necessary as breathing

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12
Q

Sexton - conversation with Plath

A

We talked death with burned-up intensity

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13
Q

Perloff - Plath’s response to the natural world

A

There was no room for wise passiveness in her response to nature; rather, she had to conquer it, to become one with her horse

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14
Q

Kendall - Plath’s landscapes

A

Plath’s landscapes explore ‘the violence, the vastness and the absence of human dimension;

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15
Q

Armitage - Hughes’ focus

A

His concerns with animal instincts, … and the manifestations of nature were at odds with the sociological preoccupation of fellow poets.

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16
Q

Armitage - Shaman

A

His view of the poet as shaman was one he took seriously

17
Q

Sagar - ‘The Wind’

A

‘Hughes brilliantly mimes the distorting and levelling power of a gale.’

18
Q

Geoffrey Hughes - animal vs man

A

Hughes’ comparisons of animals and people serve to raise the beast and debase man

19
Q

Sagar - Hawk Roosting

A

‘Animals live with one categorical imperative - an unwavering killing instinct.’

20
Q

Winterson - our creation

A

‘We are made from the Earth. Remember it, says Hughes.’

21
Q

Hughes about Plath

A

“Something of me has died with her”

22
Q

plath about daddy

A

‘Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex

23
Q

Gifford - examination at womb door

A

“Hughes strips language to its bare bones, making life and death equally stark and inescapable.”

24
Q

Perloff - morning song

A

“Plath captures the brutal honesty of motherhood, refusing to sentimentalise its alienation or awe.”

25
Rose - moon and yew tree
"Plath’s moon is a deity of detachment, watching but never intervening - a perfect symbol for her isolation."
26
Sagar - lovepet
"Hughes makes love a creature of hunger, stripping it of sentimentality and revealing its most primal nature."
27
Gifford - eco
A true ecopoet