Product Description
The controversies that surround Sylvia Plath's life and work imply that her poems are more read and studied now than ever before. This Companion provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the place in twentieth-century culture of Sylvia Plath's poetry, prose, letters and journals. The newly commissioned essays by leading international scholars represent a spectrum of critical perspectives. They pay particular attention to key debates and to well-known texts such as The Bell Jar, while offering original and thought-provoking readings to new as well as more seasoned Plath readers. ... Read more

Product Description
Using a postfeminist, poststructuralist approach, the author offers a new study of Sylvia Plath's life and work that rejects the standard myths of Plath as Doomed Poet and Deprived Woman. Bassnet demonstrates that the many voices and contradictions in Plath's poetry and life negate attempts by critics to achieve a definitive reading of her work. ... Read more

Product Description
Throughout their marriage, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes engaged in a complex and continually evolving poetic dialogue about writing, love, and grief. Although scholars have commented extensively on the biographical details of Plath's and Hughes's marriage, few have undertaken a systematic intertextual analysis of the poets' work. The Grief of Influence reappraises this extraordinary literary partnership, and shows that the aesthetic and ideological similarities that provided a foundation for Plath's and Hughes's creative marriage - such as their mutual fascination with D. H. Lawrence and motifs of violence and war - intensified their artistic rivalry. Through close readings of both poets' work and analysis of new archival sources, Clark reveals for the first time how extensively Plath borrowed from Hughes and Hughes borrowed from Plath. She also explores the transatlantic dynamics of Plath's and Hughes's 'colonial' marriage within the context of the 1950s Anglo-American poetry scene and demonstrates how each poet's misreadings of the other contributed to the damaging stereotypes that now dominate the Plath-Hughes mythology. Following Plath and Hughes through alternating periods of collaboration and competition, The Grief of Influence shows how each poet forged a voice both through and against the other's, and offers a new assessment of the twentieth century's most important poetic partnership. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Hypocritic Oaf
Bloom's Guide to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar was recently published by Chelsea House. There is a special place in my heart for Chelsea House as they are the publisher of my biography on Plath. Any Plath title under one of the many Bloom series published by Chelsea House must be approached carefully - and even then, possibly not at all. (Unless it's my biography!)

Bloom really does not care much for Plath. In the four or five publications which he has edited and/or written an introduction, I am left each time thinking the following: 1) Why did I buy this book? and 2) Why does Bloom even bother to include Plath in any series he edits? Fortunately this title was sent to me buy the publisher to review. Unfortunately I cannot recommend it.

Bloom's introduction is barely longer than one page. Here are some representative samples:

"Though I recall being unable to get very far with it [in 1971], one learns to be more dispassionate as old age augments..."


"It seems to me not possible to discover any aesthetic merit in The Bell Jar."


"It is always a little painful, for me, to place a worthy but inadequate book in an authentically critical perspective."


"Admirers of The Bell Jar have compared it to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a juxtaposition that obliterates Plath's book."


If one had not read The Bell Jar, why would they now? And what sort of introduction is this? It should at least resemble or hint upon the later content, no? Most of the book is heinously written - and aside from the introduction - cannot have been touched by Bloom. I have little respect for him, but I gather from what I do know that he is likely a better writer than this.

There are dozens of mistakes throughout the first 58 pages of the book, which appears to be the only original writing. I don't normally write in books, but I had to write "No" many times when the writer simply got things wrong. The biographical sketch is atrocious. One of my favorites is, "She and Hughes moved to the United States, where Plath taught at Smith College for a while..." For a while! How nonchalant. And the anonymous writer also claims that Plath ingested sleeping pills before committing suicide on February 11, 1963. This was news to me. The biographical sketch may have been written in 1989 as it concludes, "Sylvia Plath's gravestone is in Yorkshire, England, with Ted Hughes's name chipped off, the vandalism most likely carried out by one or several of her enduring fans."

I feel like I can be critical of "short" biographies such as this. At two and a half pages I ask, "Why bother?" Following this is a section called "The Story Behind the Story", a "List of Characters", and "Summary and Analysis." "The Story Behind the Story" is expanded and redundant in "Summary and Analysis".

Throughout the "Story" and "Summary", the writer states that Buddy Willard attended Yale Medical School. Buddy Willard did not attend medical school at Yale. Esther Greenwood says, "Buddy kissed me again in front of the house steps, and the next fall, when his scholarship to medical school came through, I went there to see him instead of to Yale" (Chapter 5). "Instead of to Yale" implies not at Yale.

The essays that follow page 58 are all complete or nearly complete reprints from other sources. It would be worth the effort to track these down as they originally appeared as in this book they are tainted. Each essay is headlined not by the title of the piece, but by a subjective summary or theme. This I found to be quite confusing and distracting. The book closes with a poorly edited and annotated bibliography, a list of works by Plath (hardly complete), and finally the sources for the essays.

I really wish I had something nice to say, but I just don't. Like Bloom's first attempt to read The Bell Jar in 1971, I didn't finish this book. It's Valentine's Day, but I'm just not feeling the love. The book will sit on my bookshelf and collect the stuff of Buddy's cadaver's and Esther's poems: dust.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The shaman Sylvia Plath
"Chapters In A Mythology" reveals that Sylvia Plath was more interested in the psyche than her biographers suggest. Sylvia's interest in psychology led her to read the work of Carl Jung and her husband Ted Hughes introduced her to the book "The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar Of Poetic Myth" by Robert Graves which is a study of the mythological and psychological sources of poetry in paganism.

Ted Hughes suggests that Sylvia possessed the visionary faculty of a shaman, "In her poetry...she had free and controlled access to depths formerly reserved to the primitive ecstatic priests, shamans, and Holy men.." Judith Kroll explains Sylvia's fascination for the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in the following terms, "For Sylvia Plath, the typical 'metaphysical' landscape provided a visual setting for the fixed, super-real, ominous, inaccessible drama of the psyche." She further praises Sylvia's "openness to contact with the unconscious are developed to an extraordinary degree." Kroll sees Sylvia's references to witches and Greek mythology as examples of paganism. For example, she argues that Sylvia viewed her nervous breakdown as a shaman's dismemberment and rebirth through ritual death of the psyche and recovery, "The dispersed 'stones' of the speaker's shattered self are gathered together and reconstructed, reenacting the myths of Dionysus (who is alluded to in 'Maenad'), Osiris, and other gods who undergo dismemberment and resurrection."

Kroll reveals that Sylvia Plath had read William James' book "Varieties of Religious Experience", "The Ten Principal Upanishads" by William Butler Yeats, "The Tibetan Book Of The Dead", and possibly some books on Zen Buddhism. Sylvia was interested in states of consciousness in which the mundane self is felt to die and a higher and larger self recovered. Therefore she was not morbidly interested in physical death but rather in ego death which permits a rebirth as a mystic in life. Although there is considerable evidence that Sylviaexperienced brief moments of ecstasy such as may occur during the manic phase of a manic depressive illness, it seems unlikely that she reached the spiritual attainment of enlightenment or mystical union with the universe or God because such mystical experiences would have given her a reason to live.

helpful
this book was extremely helpful to me while in school.The book didn't strike me in the same way it did the last person, but, then, I didn't read it cover to cover.One thing I do remember about Kroll's book was that she expressed the belief that it was a mistake or an injustice to simply read Plath's poetry as a suicide note or as something tangible left in evidence at a crime scene, like a blood stain or a chalk outline.I agree--while Plath was a confessional poet, she was different from Sexton and Lowell and the like in that she created a mythological world in which she cast her speaker as the lead.There are symbolic cycles, colors, characters, elements of re-birth, etc that would not be present if that were the case.So while some people read Plath's poetry as tangible proof of mental illness or the need for feminism or whatever, Kroll reinforced the idea that there was another level to her poetry--a mythological one.That was what I gathered from my use of the book.I felt that Anne Stevenson's Bitter Famehad the Olwyn Hughes-informed subjectivity though.But then, that wasbiography, not a study on her poetry...

critique on images in Plath's poetry...
One of the theories of Plath's work presented in Knoll's book "Chapters in a Mythology" is that Plath's poems reflect the struggle between Plath's warring "true" and "false"selves. In the same way, Knoll seems to be trying to serve to masters whenwriting her book. She writes of working closely and very well with theHughes estate, something which is almost unheard of, considering mostcritics and biographer's of Plath only come head-to-head against theestate's manipulation and tight grasp on the rights to Plath's works. Onearguement is that too much of her work is being transformed into a feministliberation cause that Plath herself never took up.

For Knoll, thetemptation to put in some feminist criticism was too great, as it sneaks inhere and there, as she deconstructs such poems as "RabbitCatcher" and "Moon and the Yew Tree" in the way in which theHughes estate sees fit, sneaking in feminist thinking between the lines.What comes through ends up being a muddied critique with conflicting ideastrying to support themselves with the same evidence at hand. Knoll, likePlath, was trying to server to masters in the authorship of this book.However, unlike her subject, Knoll was unable to sucessfully convey themeaning sufficantly for either side. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (16)

A Good Look At Suicidal Views Then And Now
A book considered a classic text on the subject,it incorporates personal experience with some good looks at just how societal views have changed over time.A long examination of the Sylvia Plath suicide and how she spiraled to her demise as well as the authors own flight into hell and attempt are looked at with a fine tooth comb.Interesting side looks at the literary side as well as the religious and stoic views which were enlightening to learn.Not clinical at all but more of a historical and philosophical look at a topic which is not too popular to talk about or to read about.A little draggy toward the end but was nonetheless interspersed with some interesting thoughts and observations which I found novel.Alvarez wrote a good book here and its' main theme and thesis can still be incorporated into practice.It should be read by those in the field for its' place in the pantheon of early 70's psychological growth.Profoundly relavent,maybe,maybe not, but it will give you a more well rounded look at the suicidal person and how the world around him changed not only its' attitude toward him, but how the suicidal persons attitude toward the world as well as himself changed as well.Just read about the Werther syndrome and you'll know what I mean.

An enduring pioneer, personal and general
I was just out of college, working in a bookstore in the Seventies, when I read this book - about a year, as Life would have it, before my first personal encounter with its subject. It stayed with me even then, and has since. Other reviews here have reminded me of the details, but what gave it its lingering weight was the evocative mix of memoir of a known figure (Plath), an overview of the subject's history and the author's personal experience. I recall the book as wonderfully readable, though I can't say if it slowed down here and there. What makes it so special and why I think it is still selling decades after I read it and after innumerable other books have since appeared is that the blend of approaches here means that a reader who wants a general overview will then be drawn into Plath and the author's story, whereas a lover of literature may start with Plath and end up learning the history. This structure also echoes the reality that this subject, so intensely personal to those who are drawn into it, is a general social problem as well, with a broad and deep history across the centuries. Many readers may have more specific interests, more precisely addressed by other works. But for many others, this mix of a personal and a broader approach is exactly what they will need to approach a subject which one would so willingly, and with reason, avoid.

A literary and historical look at suicide ... not a help book
'The Savage God' is like being back in Lit classes at college.The last thing a person seeking answers on suicide would want is this long, lingering prologue on the author's relationship with Sylvia Plath.

The book is not written for the curious, certainly not written for the suffering survivors, and not really written for the professional audience either.It spans a gray area in-between, wherein the author tends to like his own opinion and voice over the need to cater to a specific audience, choosing to attempt a rather 'poetic' approach that doesn't lend itself to the subject at hand.Perhaps he hung around Sylvia too much to write good non-fiction.

It does cover the religious implications in a meandering way, the fallacies he presents are false (such as naming weather as a fallacy when SAD *does* have an effect on suicide), a shallow look at 'feelings' over the act is more a study on an author named Pavese, and it all ends with a rather expected narration of the author's own attempt at suicide (poets are supposed to be tragic).

This isn't a study of suicide, it's an opinionated view of suicide in history and literature, and an author trying to create mediocre poetry from the tragedy of others.It's a literature book.

There is an extensive notes and index section.The book wasn't a total waste, but the title and categories are misleading because it's all one long, repetitive opinion of an author trying too hard to present poetic prose and promote his own talents and tragedies.I recommend this book only if you are researching suicide in literature, don't expect any survivor help in this one.

An Intriguing Literary Look at Suicide
I haven't read any other studies of suicide, but like many introspective people, the subject is familiar and even, ever present. Being also a huge student and aficionado of literature, A Savage God made for a pretty soothingly delightful read.

To start off, Alvarez presents one with a mildly interesting account of the author's relationship (or acquaintanceship, rather) with Sylvia Plath and some musings on her suicide. This gives way to a somewhat terribly constructed historical analysis of suicide that more or less falls flat. The psychological angle is dealt with contemptuously -- as it should be -- and the most interesting part of the book, the literary analyses, takes over in the second half.

The book was interesting in fits and starts, but never so boring in any one sustained part that I was moved to stop reading. One was carried from one stage to the next pretty seamlessly. It is conversational in style, even if the style is rather stiff and British - never personal, yet personal all along, the way some people can strip down to bare skin and their every thought is on their lips,and yet you don't get the sense of anything "personal" emerging. It's pleasant nevertheless because it's direct and honest.

Even if a lot of light wasn't shed on what is, after all, a tremendously obscure subject, the book makes for good reading because there is a lot in it that I found myself thinking I would like to know. Just know. It doesn't matter how it connects with suicide, it doesn't matter how it illuminates the problems of the human condition: there are bits of knowledge that it is simply pleasant to be in possession of, and Alvarez provides plenty of those throughout the book. Also, I would be suspicious of any psychological or existential theory that would try to wrap suicide up in a package of overarching explanation -- it can't be done, as suicide is as varied as the experience of human suffering. Alvarez's method is more freewheeling, letting a picture of suicide emerge through a few case studies, a few historical tidbits, all resulting in giving one a clearer sense of suicide than one had to begin with. It's the same sense you would get if you were to sit down and do your research to write the first book on suicide ever written. In other words, it doesn't make suicide suddenly clear to you -- but you are left knowingmore and seeing it with deeper understanding.

If it goes to recommending it, it's a pretty quick read, and well enough written so that even a person not particularly interested in either literature or suicide would find it not wholly unreadable. I notice I use the word 'pleasant' in connection with the book, despite its morbid subject: That is, strangely enough, the effect one is left with - nostalgic, wise, calm, looking at the world and at people with wide understanding eyes that see across centuries to the pain that persists contra all essential instinct.

Both literary and scholarly.
The Savage God is scholarly, aesthetically aware, and an important contribution to a relatively narrow collection of work on suicide and suicidology.

It begins with a nice little biography of Sylvia Plath and proceeds to pull from history, language, philosophy, religion, culture and the author's own bouts with depression and suicide to describe and question a very controversial act/phenomenon.

The book explores the history of suicide's socially-ascribed taboo, considers its artufulness, incorporates modern psychological opinion and ultimately leaves readers both satisfied and emotionally touched.

Can be read for research, but casual readers will enjoy most of this book as well. My rating is 4.5. Nearly a flawless achievment. ... Read more

Product Description
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Forget What You Have Read....
Forget what you've read about this particular book by Sylvia Plath. Most reviews published upon its release is 1977 hinted that the book confirms that Plath's finest talent was poetry. While that statement is apt, that is not to say her abilities as a prose fiction writer are not close on its heels--remember, she did write "The Bell Jar".

Indeed, Plath's name was made in America partly on her prose writing as well. This book collects the best of those short stories, which were featured in literary magazines during the 1950s and 60s. As well, some of her journalism is found here, and last but not least, samples of her student notebooks from Cambridge.

The edition being offered here is the longer 2nd edition from 1979 which was expanded with nearly ten more short stories that surfaced in an academic arhcive in Indiana in 1978. While most collectors struggle to acquire first editions--if it's good writing that you want, this 2nd edition will please you far more.

Lastly, while Ted Hughes' introductions to Plath's work have been met with cynicism over the years (considering his role in her life and eventual suicide), Hughes' introduction stands out as a flattering and insightful tribute to the work of his first wife.

I am glad I gave myself the chance to read and enjoy this book despite the warnings. I guess some of the best books do not necessarily appeal to masses of people--ahh, that is the joy of having a mind. ... Read more

Product Description
A children's story by Sylvia Plath which was found in manuscript form after her death. Max Nix lives with his mama and papa and six brothers in a small village called Winkelburg. Max longs for a suit - not just a workaday suit, but one for doing everything. One day, a mysterious parcel arrives. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A charming, whimsical tale
Surprisingly, Sylvia Plath, generally known as "that talented, unhappy poet who killed herself," produced this thoroughly charming, whimsical children's tale. The manuscript lay neglected and forgotten among the author's papers for decades and was first published 33 years after her death.

At first glance, the book appears to be a retelling of an old German or Scandinavian tale, but it is actually a completely original work. Many, many details of the story - the names of the characters (Emil, Otto, Hugo, Johann, etc.), their interests (skiing, tobagganning, ice fishing), their clothing (leather knickers with carved bone buttons, a green felt hat with a turkey feather in it, blue or red ski suits embroidered with snowflakes or edelweiss) - as well as the illustrations, give the book an old-fashioned, Mittle European feel.

More than simply a literary curiosity, The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit is a delightful surprise, sweet without sentimentality, and revealing a side of Plath that has rarely been seen before. ... Read more

Product Description
When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim, immediately landing on the bestseller list. Few suspected that Hughes had been at work for a quarter of a century on this cycle of poems addressed to his first wife, Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner explores the destructive relationship between these two poets through their lives and their writings. She provides a commentary to the poems in Birthday Letters, showing the events that shaped them and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work. 8 pages of b/w photographs. ... Read more

Product Description
Key Features:*Study methods *Introduction to the text *Summaries with critical notes *Themes and techniques *Textual analysis of key passages *Author biography *Historical and literary background *Modern and historical critical approaches *Chronology *Glossary of literary terms ... Read more

Product Description

The poet Sylvia Plath has been a cultural icon since 1963 when she took her own life on a cold winter morning at the age of 30. This up-to-date biography explores the nature and sources of the mythology that has surrounded the poet's life by presenting a balanced account of her own life and the many significant people and events that influenced her.

This outstanding biography presents the facts of Plath's life as they are known in the 21st century. The research for this biography uitilizes the latest updated scholarship including new information released in the unabridged journals published in 2000 and the newly accessible Ted Hughes archives. In addition to this primary research, conducted in part at Smith College, Kirk also provides new insights and perspectives from original interview material with a Plath contemporary who personally knew her. Whether read for a school assignment or for personal interest, this highly readable biography offers an accessible alternative to the density of Plath scholarship. Readers who wish to pursue the topic further will find an extensive bibliography of biographical and critical sources, a full list of Plath's writings, an appendix of her own literary holdings, and another appendix of her family tree.

Product Description
"A beautiful and richly instructive book, a worthy and welcome sequel to Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth."

Louis S. Auchincloss

An intimately perceptive account, by a poet who knew them all, of the brilliant circle of poets who lived and worked in Boston through the half-decade beginning in 1955. That was the year Peter Davison, coming to Boston as a book editor. was swept up in a world -- in a tumult -- of poetry. He rediscovered his father's old friend Robert Frost. He briefly squired Sylvia Plath. He came to know Robert Lowell (whose poems and private disasters dominated the period) and Adrienne Rich, Stanley Kunitz, Richard Wilbur. Anne Sexton, W. S. Merwin, and others who, closely bound together in friendship or rivalry or both, defined the shape of American poetry at mid-century Through their eves as well as his own, and often in their words, Davison presents a sharply fresh vision of the shift from confidence to a troubled questioning that overtook America -- a transformation that was, in a sense, foreshadowed in the sensibilities, in the writings, sometimes in the lives, of some of our finest poets. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Boston through the lens of its poets
After my wife and I first went to Boston, and before our second trip, I acquired and read this book. On the first trip we found ourselves, one grey afternoon, in the bar at the Ritz Carlton opposite Boston Common, having drinks. It had the atmosphere of something... but what? Now we know that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton used to also go here for drinks after Robert Lowell's poetry classes. Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for those times.

This book is a fascinating recounting of those times and the many poets in Boston and Cambridge and their various relationships by one who was of that circle. Not a "tell-all", just human. People on their life journey. Interesting formative people. It can guide you on an alternative tour of the city and with a little imagination you can 'see' and feel what went on behind those walls from the time and the people who led one writer, I forget which, to say 'America did not enter the twentieth century until the 1960s.' These are among the formative ones and this is one of the places that led that to happen. You will see Boston differently after. And isn't that what makes any read worthwhile. ... Read more

Product Description
Despite being widely studied on both undergraduate and postgraduate courses the writing of Sylvia Plath has been relatively neglected in relation to the attention given to her life and what drove her to suicide. Tracy Brain aims to remedy this by introducing completely new approaches to Plath's writing, taking the studies away from the familiar concentration to reveal that Plath as a writer was concerned with a much wider range of important cultural and political topics. Unlike most of the existing literary criticism it shifts the focus away from biographical readings and encompasses the full range of Plath's poetry, prose, journals and letters using a variety of critical methods. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

INSIGHTFUL AND A GREAT READ�Buy it when you see the movie!
Tracy Brain is a writer of uncommon talent who brings Sylvia Plath to life in a way no other academic writer has. Instead of dredging up the same old biographical information, Ms. Brain goes where others have not even attempted. I enjoyed the examination of Plath's letters, the new information I gleaned about Plath's relationship with Ted Hughes, and the interesting new connections made between Plath's work and her inner life. Highly recommended! ... Read more