Nov 11, 2017 05:35 AM
https://literaryreview.co.uk/sunny-sylvia
EXCERPT: [...] the letters come from her childhood, adolescence and student years [...] This volume is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a genre with very few examples. Although the letters are long, detailed, vivid, varied, imaginative, wide-ranging, funny and informative, they include topics you won’t find in Keats or Frost.
[...] Moreover, Plath was writing to project an image of the perfect daughter, the popular college girl, the prizewinning student and the precocious poet. Her letters [...] are performances; she is always choosing which face to present, which voice to adopt. She saved her self-doubt, bitchiness, anger and sexuality for her journals. But the letters are important in understanding Plath’s evolution as an artist and the revolutionary era of women’s poetry to which she belonged.
[...] But these letters seem like emotional rehearsals. In her journals, she is more honest. ‘Let’s face it,’ she writes in May 1953, ‘I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren’t many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own, and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted … I want a romantic nonexistent hero.’ Where such a man did not exist, she would invent one through the force of her will.
After meeting Ted Hughes on 25 February 1956 [...] her letters explode with a passion and urgency [...] To her mother she writes, ‘I feel that all my life, all my pain and work, has been for this one thing. All the blood spilt, the words written, the people loved, have been a work to fit me for loving Ted.’ He is not just her romantic hero, but also her ‘male counterpart’. Finding him means the fulfilment of her poetic destiny. To her brother she explains, ‘I am now coming into the full of my power: I am writing poetry as I never have before … because I am in love with the only man in the world who is my match.’
[...] But in these early letters we see the beginning of Plath’s powerful belief in Hughes’s poetic greatness and her determination to make the world see him as a colossus. After her death, Hughes would help create her legend as well, overseeing the release of her work. Plath and Hughes are the restless Cathy and Heathcliff of 20th-century literature. In Frieda Hughes’s words, they are ‘as married in death as they once were in life’....
MORE: https://literaryreview.co.uk/sunny-sylvia
EXCERPT: [...] the letters come from her childhood, adolescence and student years [...] This volume is a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a genre with very few examples. Although the letters are long, detailed, vivid, varied, imaginative, wide-ranging, funny and informative, they include topics you won’t find in Keats or Frost.
[...] Moreover, Plath was writing to project an image of the perfect daughter, the popular college girl, the prizewinning student and the precocious poet. Her letters [...] are performances; she is always choosing which face to present, which voice to adopt. She saved her self-doubt, bitchiness, anger and sexuality for her journals. But the letters are important in understanding Plath’s evolution as an artist and the revolutionary era of women’s poetry to which she belonged.
[...] But these letters seem like emotional rehearsals. In her journals, she is more honest. ‘Let’s face it,’ she writes in May 1953, ‘I am in danger of wanting my personal absolute to be a demigod of a man, and as there aren’t many around, I often unconsciously manufacture my own, and then, I retreat and revel in poetry and literature where the reward value is tangible and accepted … I want a romantic nonexistent hero.’ Where such a man did not exist, she would invent one through the force of her will.
After meeting Ted Hughes on 25 February 1956 [...] her letters explode with a passion and urgency [...] To her mother she writes, ‘I feel that all my life, all my pain and work, has been for this one thing. All the blood spilt, the words written, the people loved, have been a work to fit me for loving Ted.’ He is not just her romantic hero, but also her ‘male counterpart’. Finding him means the fulfilment of her poetic destiny. To her brother she explains, ‘I am now coming into the full of my power: I am writing poetry as I never have before … because I am in love with the only man in the world who is my match.’
[...] But in these early letters we see the beginning of Plath’s powerful belief in Hughes’s poetic greatness and her determination to make the world see him as a colossus. After her death, Hughes would help create her legend as well, overseeing the release of her work. Plath and Hughes are the restless Cathy and Heathcliff of 20th-century literature. In Frieda Hughes’s words, they are ‘as married in death as they once were in life’....
MORE: https://literaryreview.co.uk/sunny-sylvia