Hughes + Plath Flashcards
(27 cards)
Bate - purpose of poetry
‘For Plath, desire was always a purple bruise; For Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound”
Bate - time together
“They were barely apart, day or night, from the summer of 1956 to the autumn of 1963”
Bate - Hughes Natural world
“a boy completely at home on the land and in the landscape”
Holbrook - aim of plath’s poetry
“Plath’s poetry is a psychotic testimony to her own mental disorder”
Gifford - relationship between poets
‘Plath and Hughes’ poetry is reciprocal and cross-pollinated’
McClanahan - psyhic spaces
‘Plath’s poetry focuses on the blur between mindscape and landscape’
Kirwan - Plath’s faith
‘struggle with faith rather than a rejection of it.’
Gail Crowther
‘Reluctant atheist’
Al Alvarez - Death
“Plath’s art left her no direction except death”
Armitage - Fox
“Fox as an icon of inspiration”
Clark - why did plath write
Writing was not something that Sylvia did to please others, but to please herself - as necessary as breathing
Sexton - conversation with Plath
We talked death with burned-up intensity
Perloff - Plath’s response to the natural world
There was no room for wise passiveness in her response to nature; rather, she had to conquer it, to become one with her horse
Kendall - Plath’s landscapes
Plath’s landscapes explore ‘the violence, the vastness and the absence of human dimension;
Armitage - Hughes’ focus
His concerns with animal instincts, … and the manifestations of nature were at odds with the sociological preoccupation of fellow poets.
Armitage - Shaman
His view of the poet as shaman was one he took seriously
Sagar - ‘The Wind’
‘Hughes brilliantly mimes the distorting and levelling power of a gale.’
Geoffrey Hughes - animal vs man
Hughes’ comparisons of animals and people serve to raise the beast and debase man
Sagar - Hawk Roosting
‘Animals live with one categorical imperative - an unwavering killing instinct.’
Winterson - our creation
‘We are made from the Earth. Remember it, says Hughes.’
Hughes about Plath
“Something of me has died with her”
plath about daddy
‘Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex
Gifford - examination at womb door
“Hughes strips language to its bare bones, making life and death equally stark and inescapable.”
Perloff - morning song
“Plath captures the brutal honesty of motherhood, refusing to sentimentalise its alienation or awe.”