Plath and Hughes context

Hughes general

Hughes's earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world.[57] Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success. Examples can be seen in the poems "Hawk Roosting" and "Jaguar".[57] The West Riding dialect of Hughes's childhood remained a staple of his poetry, his lexicon lending a texture that is concrete, terse, emphatic, economical yet powerful. The manner of speech renders the hard facts of things and wards off self-indulgence.[14] Hughes's later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the British bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, Jungian and ecological viewpoint.[57] He re-worked classical and archetypal myth working with a conception of the dark sub-conscious.[57]

Daddy

"Daddy" is perhaps Sylvia Plath's best-known poem. It has elicited a variety of distinct reactions, from feminist praise of its unadulterated rage towards male dominance, to wariness at its usage of Holocaust imagery. It has been reviewed and criticized by hundreds and hundreds of scholars, and is upheld as one of the best examples of confessional poetry. It is certainly a difficult poem for some: its violent imagery, invocation of Jewish suffering, and vitriolic tone can make it a decidedly uncomfortable reading experience. Overall, the poem relates Plath's journey of coming to terms with her father's looming figure; he died when she was eight. She casts herself as a victim and him as several figures, including a Nazi, vampire, devil, and finally, as a resurrected figure her husband, whom she has also had to kill. Though the final lines have a triumphant tone, it is unclear whether she means she has gotten "through" to him in terms of communication, or whether she is "through" thinking about him. Plath explained the poem briefly in a BBC interview: The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other -she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it. In other words, contradiction is at the heart of the poem's meaning. Neither its triumph nor its horror is to be taken as the sum total of her intention. Instead, each element is contradicted by its opposite, which explains how it shoulders so many distinct interpretations. This sense of contradiction is also apparent in the poem's rhyme scheme and organization. It uses a sort of nursery rhyme, singsong way of speaking. There are hard sounds, short lines, and repeated rhymes (as in "Jew," "through," "do," and "you"). This establishes and reinforces her status as a childish figure in relation to her authoritative father. This relationship is also clear in the name she uses for him - "Daddy"- and in her use of "oo" sounds and a childish cadence. However, this childish rhythm also has an ironic, sinister feel, since the chant-like, primitive quality can feel almost like a curse. One critic wrote that the poem's "simplistic, insistent rhythm is one form of control, the obsessive rhyming and repeated short phrases are others, means by which she attempts to charm and hold off evil spirits." In other words, the childish aspects have a crucial, protective quality, rather than an innocent one. "Daddy" can also be viewed as a poem about the individual trapped between herself and society. Plath weaves together patriarchal figures - a father, Nazis, a vampire, a husband - and then holds them all accountable for history's horrors. Like "The Colossus," "Daddy" imagines a larger-than-life patriarchal figure, but here the figure has a distinctly social, political aspect. Even the vampire is discussed in terms of its tyrannical sway over a village. In this interpretation, the speaker comes to understand that she must kill the father figure in order to break free of the limitations that it places upon her. In particular, these limitations can be understood as patriarchal forces that enforce a strict gender structure. It has the feel of an exorcism, an act of purification. And yet the journey is not easy. She realizes what she has to do, but it requires a sort of hysteria. In order to succeed, she must have complete control, since she fears she will be destroyed unless she totally annihilates her antagonist. The question about the poem's confessional, autobiographical content is also worth exploring. The poem does not exactly conform to Plath's biography, and her above-cited explanation suggests it is a carefully-constructed fiction. And yet its ambivalence towards male figures does correspond to the time of its composition - she wrote it soon after learning that her husband Ted Hughes had left her for another woman. Further, the mention of a suicide attempt links the poem to her life. However, some critics have suggested that the poem is actually an allegorical representation of her fears of creative paralysis, and her attempt to slough off the "male muse." Stephen Gould Axelrod writes that "at a basic level, 'Daddy' concerns its own violent, transgressive birth as a text, its origin in a culture that regards it as illegitimate -a judgment the speaker hurls back on the patriarch himself when she labels him a bastard." The father is perceived as an object and as a mythical figure (many of them, in fact), and never really attains any real human dimensions. It is less a person than a stifling force that puts its boot in her face to silence her. From this perspective, the poem is inspired less by Hughes or Otto than by agony over creative limitations in a male literary world. However, even this interpretation begs something of an autobiographical interpretation, since both Hughes and her father were representations of that world. Plath's usage of Holocaust imagery has inspired a plethora of critical attention. She was not Jewish but was in fact German, yet was obsessed with Jewish history and culture. Several of her poems utilize Holocaust themes and imagery, but this one features the most striking and disturbing ones. She imagines herself being taken on a train to "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen," and starting to talk like a Jew and feel like a Jew. She refers to her father as a "panzer-man," and notes his Aryan looks and his "Luftwaffe" brutality. One of the leading articles on this topic, written by Al Strangeways, concludes that Plath was using her poetry to understand the connection between history and myth, and to stress the voyeurism that is an implicit part of remembering. Plath had studied the Holocaust in an academic context, and felt a connection to it; she also felt like a victim, and wanted to combine the personal and public in her work to cut through the stagnant double-talk of Cold War America. She certainly uses Holocaust imagery, but does so alongside other violent myths and history, including those of Electra, vampirism, and voodoo. Strangeways writes that, "the Holocaust assumed a mythic dimension because of its extremity and the difficulty of understanding it in human terms, due to the mechanical efficiency with which it was carried out, and the inconceivably large number of victims." In other words, its shocking content is not an accident, but is rather an attempt to consider how the 20th century's great atrocity reflects and escalates a certain human quality. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that any of Sylvia Plath's poems could leave the reader unmoved. "Daddy" is evidence of her profound talent, part of which rested in her unabashed confrontation with her personal history and the traumas of the age in which she lived. That she could write a poem that encompasses both the personal and historical is clear in "Daddy."

Ariel

It was on her 30th birthday, 27 October 1962, that Sylvia Plath wrote the poem that she eventually decided should give its title to her second collection of poetry. As well as being the airy spirit eventually released by Prospero in The Tempest, Ariel was the name of a horse that Plath used to ride in Devon. Like a number of the poems that she wrote in the aftermath of the collapse of her marriage to Ted Hughes earlier that summer, 'Ariel' transforms an everyday rural activity - horse riding - into a vividly charged narrative, dramatising extreme, vertiginous, conflicted emotions. Her use of the word 'Suicidal' towards the end of 'Ariel' has meant that the poem has often been read as enacting her compulsion to dice with death: in his Preface to the American edition of Ariel Robert Lowell described her late work as 'playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder'. What is perhaps most fascinating about the volume's title poem, however, is its layering of the thrilling physical and visual experience of an early morning horse ride with Plath's equally thrilling quest for a new kind of poetry, one able to communicate, through the energy of its rhythms and the violence of its imagery, dangerously powerful, indeed overwhelming, feelings. Yet for all the poem's intensity, the meanings of its various metaphors remain ambivalent: should one interpret, for instance, its final depiction of her flying into 'the red // Eye, the cauldron of morning' as signifying apocalyptic conflagration or as looking towards an exciting vita nuova? Startling in its precision and purposefulness, the language of 'Ariel' brilliantly enables the contradictions that are the source of its energy to co-exist without resolution. 'Something else hauls me' The urgency of the emotions driving 'Ariel' is reflected in the compression of the poem's idiom: its opening line, 'Stasis in darkness', uses just five syllables to convey the experience of sitting on an unmoving horse while waiting for dawn. Plath's language is insistently metaphorical throughout, while achieving immediacy by paring and eliding and fusing: 'God's lioness, / How one we grow'; there is no time for simile-introducing words such as 'like'. The ride itself unfurls in a kind of poetic shorthand, 'the substanceless blue / Pour of tor' (a tor is a Devonshire word for a rocky hill) capturing the kaleidoscopic whirl of land and sky impressionistically registered mid-gallop. Yet, despite the poem's reckless speed, Plath also manages to develop complex analogies that take some puzzling out: stanza three, for instance, is devoted to an intricate visual comparison between the sweeping brown curve that can be seen when looking down a furrow in a ploughed field and the sweeping brown curve of Ariel's neck. This comparison is presented, however, as occurring in the poem's present, as flashing through the mind of the rider as she zooms past each furrow, on the verge of losing control: The furrow Splits and passes, sister to The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch ... The analogy works somewhat in the ingenious manner of a metaphysical conceit, and like numerous religious poems by John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell, 'Ariel' can be read as dramatising a dialogue between body and soul: the blackberries glimpsed in the next stanza, for instance, are figured as attempting to restrain her helter-skelter dash towards transcendence, as allegorical 'hooks' that might slow her down or waylay her; the 'black sweet blood mouthfuls' they offer are emblematic of tempting, earthly pleasures, and her dismissal of them as mere 'shadows' is a crucial stage in her surrender to the 'something else' that 'hauls' her 'through air'. (It is, incidentally, surely much to be regretted that the need to intensify every perception leads Plath to convert these blackberries into 'Nr-eye / Berries', even if in the early 1960s the N-word was not as beyond the pale as it has since become.) While on the literal level this 'something else' is her horse Ariel, as the 'red eye' of the final lines is the early morning sun, on the plane of the psychodrama that the poem develops this force might be glossed as the compulsive eruption of transgressive energies so extreme that they both shatter social taboos and prompt an exhilarating, if perilous, reconfiguration of the self. 'White Godiva' This reconfiguration involves a casting off of clothes and conventions and obligations. As Prospero releases Ariel at the end of The Tempest, with the words 'Then to the elements / Be free, and fare thou well', so in 'Ariel' Plath imagines herself escaping the 'Dead hands, dead stringencies' that confine her, and even as dissolving the weight and limitations of her own physical being - 'Thighs, hair; / Flakes from my heels'. Yet by also describing herself as 'White / Godiva', she summons up an altogether less consensual model of liberation than that of Ariel from Prospero. The 11th-century noblewoman Lady Godiva was reputed to have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry in protest against the excessive taxes that her husband was imposing on his tenants. The reference reminds us of the 'big strip tease' that Plath presents herself performing in 'Lady Lazarus' (also composed in the last week of October 1962), and it is no coincidence that Lady Godiva's legendary ride was a courageous act of defiance of a cruel, unjust husband. While 'Ariel' does not demonise Hughes in the way that 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy' do, the allusion to Godiva links the poem's quest for freedom with her more explicit attacks elsewhere on the forces of patriarchy, as well as with the willingness expressed in related poems to engage in mocking erotic self-performance as a form of protest and vengeance, to 'unpeel' herself in a public place, just as Lady Lazarus allowed herself to be unwrapped in front of the 'peanut-crunching crowd'. Both vulnerable and aggressive, the naked Lady Godiva serves as a striking visual image of the paradoxes that generate the contradictory forces at play in the last third of the poem. 'The arrow, the dew' For good or ill, the force behind the poem so transforms Plath's sense of her identity that rather than locating herself in the landscape, she becomes it: I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas. ... And I Am the arrow, The dew that flies ... It is interesting to note that early drafts of the poem include an address to her horse, 'O bright / Beast'; its elimination from the final version is another instance of the urge to dissolve the physical and the circumstantial, an urge most potently, and troublingly, expressed in her rejection of her maternal role - 'The child's cry // Melts in the wall'. In the poem's final lines her liberation from her social and physical self is so complete that she asks to be construed either as a visionary seer, or as someone who has now decisively moved beyond all the 'hooks' that might attach her to everyday existence. As both arrow and dew Plath is aimed upwards; and although it may be worth remembering that both will eventually return to earth, the poem's forward thrust negates such considerations, asking us to imagine only their hurtling, like Icarus, towards the sun: the drive Into the red Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Hughes' experiences of outdoor life such as farming, fishing and hunting.

-School years - during these years that Hughes had his first glimpse at the brutality of the natural world. One summer, he accidentally left three pikes he'd caught in the school's fish tank for the duration of the holidays. Upon returning in September, just one fish remained; the other two having succumbed to an act of cannibalism. This was to inspire one of his most famous works, "Pike." -He would turn to this brutality to both reflect and deal with his own pain and suffering in later life. Hughes's fourth book of poems, Crow, was completed in the years following the suicides of his partners. It's, unsurprisingly, his bleakest poetry. -Fishing "That he enjoyed it terms it mildly," -"I think the real fascination of fishing to me is certainly more than just fish. It's something to do with the whole world . . . of your reaction to, your response to water and things living in water, the fascination of flowing water and living things coming up out of it — to grab at you and be grabbed." -"Any kind of fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self." -remains were scattered at a secret spot, close to the source of Dartmoor's River Taw

Hughes' literary influences such as his reading of European poetry and the Movement poets

-his greatest contribution to the landscape of British poetry may be the internationalism he promoted through Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), the magazine he co-founded in 1965 with writer Daniel Weissbort, through the founding of Poetry International in 1967 (a poetry festival), and through his own translations and the poetic dialogue he had with those he translated, particularly the Hungarian poets János Pilinszky and Ferenc Juhász in the 1960s and 1970s. -The poet and scholar Tara Bergin has written extensively on how Hughes's own work, particularly the songs of Crow - "songs with no music whatsoever", as Hughes phrased it - owes a great deal to his proximity with the deliberately unadorned poetry of Pilinszky. -In the 1950s, the main group of influential English poets were known as "The Movement." Philip Larkin. -a polite, common-sense, disciplined style, often delivered with a bored, cynical voice -a distrust of flamboyance, the irrational, explorations of the subconscious mind, and nature poetry. -A good word to describe the Movement poets is "urbane." "Urbane" means refined, sophisticated, elegant, dignified, and well-mannered. -Level-headed, as rational. Their aims, according to Hughes (somewhat sarcastically), were to have "a nice cigarette and a view of the park." He thought their poetry was "cosy." -Hughes's poems, with their sense of violence, wildness, ambiguity, and interiority, can definitely be seen as a reaction to the urbanity of Movement poetry.

Tulips

In "Tulips" (Ariel), one of Plath's most popular poems, she uses a personal experience as a setting to express the complexities that the idea of childlessness has for her. Ted Hughes says she wrote "Tulips" after being hospitalized for an appendectomy in March of 1961. She had miscarried just a short time before this operation; probably the second hospital confinement triggered associations with death and birth. These tulips are "like an awful baby." There is something wild and dangerous about them. She wants to reject them because she says they "eat my oxygen." She wants to reject the tulips as she wants to reject the trappings of her life and the family she has: Now I have lost myself, I am sick of baggage-- My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. Not tulips but death is the gift she wants, as in "A Birthday Present" (Ariel), but in both cases the irony is that the gift is life. What she finds in her rejection of the gift here is freedom, a kind of perfection: I didn't want any flowers. I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free-- . . . . it is what the dead close on, finally. . . . Her freedom is both wonderful and terrible because the price is so high. The woman must give up her man and her child that hook onto her, as well as her things, her possessions. And the ultimate price--and reward--is death. From "Viciousness in the Kitchen: Sylvia Plath's Domestic Poetry." Modern Language Studies 7.2 (1977). Eileen M. Aird The world of the hospital ward is a welcome one of snowy whiteness and silence, in which the woman grasps eagerly at the ability to relax completely because nothing is required of her. She has moved beyond normal activity, and relishes the opportunity to relinquish all responsibility, to become a 'body' with no personal identity: I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons. The renunciation of individuality also includes the reduction of others to a depersonalised level, so that they make no claims on her and she is aware of making none on them; consequently she sees the nurses hurrying about the ward as being as alike as a flock of gulls flying inland. She sees herself as an inanimate object, a, pebble. . . . The tulips erupt into the whiteness of the microcosm the patient has created as a painful reminder of the health which she consciously strives to reject. The world of Ariel is a black and white one into which red, which represents blood, the heart and living is always an intrusion. The tulips hurt beacuse they require the emotional response which will rouse her from the numbness of complete mental and physical inactivity; she feels that the flowers have eyes which watch her and increase her sense of her own unreality: 'And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow/ Between the eye of the sun and the eye of the tulips.' This sense of unreality, of substancelessness, is not similar to the feeling of immersion in self which she has cultivated, it is a sense of inadequacy and alienation also described in "Cut": "I have taken a pill to kill/The thin/Papery feeling.' Eventually the tulips force her attention into focus and she merges from the world of whiteness and silence to a not unpleasurable anticipation: And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea And comes from a country far away as health. Although 'Tulips' is written in the present tense it has less of the immediacy of some of the later poems in Ariel because the element of control exhibited in the meditative focus and the fashioning of thought and feeling into logically connected statements operates as a distancing device. From Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work. Copyright © 1973 by Eileen M. Aird. Margaret Dickie One of the few poems she saved from this period is "Tulips," written in March, 1961, about some flowers she had received when she was in the hospital recovering from her appendectomy. Actually the flowers are only the occasion for a remarkable psychological journey into and out of anaesthesia, the "numbness" the nurse brings her in "bright needles." The poem traces the stages by which the hospital patient sinks reluctantly into an anaesthesized "peacefulness," and equally reluctantly comes out of it, through repeating and reversing the imagery of the first four stanzas in the imagery of the last four so that the poem moves into and out from a central stanza with unusual symmetry. The "too excitable" tulips and their explosions in the first stanza are what the patient awakes to finally in the last stanza, where she claims that the tulips "should be behind bars like dangerous animals." In the first, she has given her name and day-clothes away; in the last, she reclaims herself: "I am aware of my heart." In the second stanza, as she relinquishes herself to the nurses that "pass and pass," she is propped up "Like an eye between two white lids"; coming back to life in the penultimate stanza, she moves through the same stage where the tulips interrupt the air "Coming and going" and "concentrate" her attention. The nurses' tending in the third stanza is matched by the tulips' watching in the seventh. The sensation that her possessions "Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head" just before she succumbs to the anaesthesia in the fourth stanza is reversed in the sixth, when, awaking, she feels that the tulips "seem to float, though they weigh me down," "A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck." In the middle stanza she attempts, in Emily Dickinson style, to describe the state beyond consciousness: "How free it is, you have no idea how free-- / The peacefulness is so big it dazes you." "Tulips" is an unusual poem for Plath because it does move inward toward a silent center and out again. The fear, shown in many of Plath's early poems, of losing control or the final reluctant relinquishment to unfathomable powers is absent in this process; where she claims, "I am learning peacefulness," "I only wanted/ To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty." Even more unusual than this acceptance of self-loss is the process of reversal, where the mind gradually takes hold again after the grim recognition that the tulips' "redness talks to my wound, it corresponds." The common strategy of Plath's poems early and late is for the mind to generate hyperboles that torment itself; but in "Tulips" this generative faculty has a positive as well as a negative function. "Tulips" is not a cheerful poem, but it does move from cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from empty whiteness to vivid redness, in a process manipulated by the associative imagination. The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends the poem on a tentative note, moving toward the far-away country of health. Because she has so exaggerated her own emptiness and the tulips' violence and vitality, she must then accept in herself the attributes she has cast onto the tulips, which return to her as correspondences. If the supersensitive mind can turn tulips into explosions, it can also reverse the process and turn dangerous animals into blooming hearts. The control of "Tulips" -- the matching of stanzas, the correspondences developed between the external object and states of consciousness -- marks a new stage in Plath's development. Her earlier efforts to train her vision outward, toward the landscape, and to concentrate on realistic details, as well as her very early apprenticeship in set forms combine with the Yaddo exercises in spontaneous associative creation to prepare her for her final poems, of which "Tulips" was the first example. In "Tulips" she develops a new persona. Though she is neither the public persona of Plath's moor-walker or seaside visitor nor the intensely private and fragmented identity of her surrealistic meditations, this speaker shares qualities of both. She is clearly in a hospital, responding to nurses, needles, flowers; but she is just as clearly engaged in an internal drama, reacting to a wild imaginative activity. The tension between outer and inner images is maintained (as it had not been in the early poems) by a tremendous artistic and psychological control. In this poem Plath reveals what she meant when she said that the manipulative mind must control its most terrifying experiences. The speaker here, responsive to inner and outer compulsions, is able to handle her situation. As the inner tensions intensified in the last months of her own life, Plath was forced to create a persona much more rigid than the speaker of "Tulips." At this point, however, rigidity is what she scorns. From Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1979 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Charles Molesworth In "Tulips," the imagery of forced seeing, of vision itself as the source of the exacerbated sensibility, assaults us everywhere: They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The comic, almost spitting disgust of the assonance in the phrase "stupid pupil" adds to the allusive parody of Emerson's "'transparent eyeball" from Nature. But this painful, forced seeing is still, one feels, better than the anesthetized drift that constantly threatens to overtake the poet. But whatever the reader might feel, Plath seems consciously desirous of either the drift or the pained fixation, as long as it provides her with an extreme experiential locus. I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. The openness to experience that some regard as one of the hallmarks of American literature becomes, in Plath's poetry, an ironically balanced pointer that can tip toward either salvation or annihilation. I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free-- The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. These alternatives, salvation or annihilation, are here joined in a single image-turned-simile; and the toneless quality of the lines parodies the transcendent religious structure that lies behind them, just as "stupid pupil" parodies Emerson. "So big it dazes you" and "you have no idea how free" both originate in the vocabulary of schoolgirl intensification, and Plath built her language almost exclusively out of various forms of intensification. Condensation, catachresis, metonymy, and the verbal strategies of riddles and allusive jokes: all these and more are devices both to record and to ward off the numbing that results when ordinary consciousness is faced with an overwhelmingly fragmented objective world, a flood of facticity that simply will not submit to tenderness or mercy. One of the standard critical cliches at sprang up around confessional poets was that the language itself provided their salvation, that the redeeming word could set right what the intractable world of egos, projects, deceits, and self-destructions had insidiously twisted. This axiom still putatively left room for individual poets to develop personal styles and remain recognizably confessional. Oddly enough, however, when thrown back on a radically personal axis, the poetry often ended up being simultaneously god-haunted and narcotized, as if narcosis and transcendence were mirror images of each other. In the poetry of Plath and Sexton, we find not only the subject matter but also the very structure of their imaginations returning again and again to an irreducible choice: the poet either must become God or cease consciousness altogether. Haunted by the failed myth of a human, or at least an artistic, perfectability, they turned to a courtship of nihilism. From The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry. Copyright © 1979 by the Curators of the University of Missouri. Barbara Hardy In "Tulips," there is a slow, reluctant acceptance of the tulips, which means a slow, reluctant acceptance of a return to life. The poem dramatizes a sick state, making it clear that it is sickness. The flowers are hateful, as emblems of cruel spring, as presents from the healthy world that wants her back, as suspect, like all presents. They are also emblems of irrational fear: science is brilliantly misused (as indeed in feeble and deranged states of many kinds) and phototropism and photosynthesis are used to argue the fear: the flowers really do move toward the light, do open out, do take up oxygen. The tulips are also inhabitants of the bizarre world of private irrational fantasy, even beyond the bridge of distorted science: they contrast with the whiteness of nullity and death, are like a baby, an African cat, are like her wound (a real red physical wound, stitched so as to heal, not to gape like opened tulips) and, finally, like her heart. The end of the poem is transforming, opens up the poem. The poem, like the tulips, has really been opening from the beginning, but all is not plain until the end, as in "Nick." Moreover, in the end the tulips win, and that is the point. It is a painful victory for life. We move from the verge of hallucination, which can hear them as noisy, or see them as dangerous animals, to a proper rationality, which accepts recovery. The poem hinges on this paradox: while most scientific, it is most deranged; while most surreal, it is most healthy: And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health. It is the country she as to return to, reluctant though she is: the identification of the breathing, opened, red, spring-like tulips with her heart makes this plain. She wanted death, certainly, as one may want it in illness or, moving back from the poem to the other poems and to her real death, as she wanted it in life. But the poem enacts the movement from the peace and purity of anaesthesia and feebleness to the calls of life. Once more, the controlled conceits; and the movement from one state to another creates expansion. The poem opens out to our experience of sickness and health, to the overwhelming demands of love, which we sometimes have to meet. The symbolism of present giving and spring flowers makes a bridge from a personal death-longing to common experience . . . . From The Survival of Poetry. Copyright © 1970 by Barbara Hardy Richard Grey A poem like 'Tulips' is a good illustration of Plath's passion and her craft. Its origins lie in personal experience: a time when the poet was taken into hospital and was sent flowers as a gift. The opening four stanzas recover her feelings of peace and release on entering the hospital ward. 'Look how white everything is', she exclaims: how quiet, how snowed-in, I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands, I am nobody . . . The verse is nominally free but has a subtle iambic base; the lines, seven to each stanza, move quietly and mellifluously; and a sense of hidden melody ('learning' / 'lying', 'lying by myself quietly', 'light lies', 'white walls') transforms apparently casual remarks into memorable speech. What is more to the point, the almost sacramental terms in which Plath describes herself turn this experience into a mysterious initiation, a dying away from the world. 'I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses', Plath says, 'And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to the surgeons'. Everything that gives her identity, that imprisons her in existence, has been surrendered; and she sinks into a condition of utter emptiness, openness that is associated at certain times here with immersion in water -- a return to the foetal state and the matrix of being. The only initial resistance to this movement comes from a photograph of her husband and children she has by her bedside: reminding her, evidently, of the hell of other people, who cast 'little smiling hooks' to fish her up out of the sea. In the next four stanzas, the tulips -- mentioned briefly in the first line and then forgotten -- enter the scene with a vengeance: The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. The flowers arc all that is the opposite of the white, silent world of the hospital, carrying associations of noise and pressure, 'sudden tongues and . . . colour'. They draw Plath back to life, the conditioning forces that constitute existence. She feels herself 'watched', identified by 'the eyes of the tulips': their gaze commits her to a particular status or role. What is more, this contrary impulse drawing her back into the world and identification 'corresponds' to something in herself. It comes from within her, just as the earlier impulse towards liberation did. This probably explains why the conflict of the poem remains unresolved: the ninth and final stanza of the poem simply and beautifully juxtaposes images of imprisonment and escape, the blood of life and the salt sea of death. 'And I am aware of my heart', Plath concludes: it opens and closes ts bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me, The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health. The alternatives here are familiar ones in American writing: either to live in the world and accept the identity it prescribes, or to flee into a state of absolute freedom. What is less familiar is that, here as elsewhere, Plath associates these two alternatives, traditionally figured in the clearing and the wilderness, with the absolute conditions of being and not-being. Fixity, in these terms, is life; flight is immolation; freedom is the immediate metaphor of the hospital and the ultimate metamorphosis of death. From American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Copyright © 1990 by the Longman Group UK Limited. Renée R. Curry Plath steeps the poem "Tulips" in a whiteness depicted as powerful, peaceful, and obliterating: . . . The wintry whiteness of the white walls presses in on the speaker, both teaching her about tranquility and enforcing it on her. The pressure results in eradication of herself and obliteration of the volatility of life. Van Dyne links this annihilation to "the speaker's fears of carnal and contaminating flesh" (Revising Life 92). As well, Van Dyne suggests that the speaker enjoys the process of noting the body's drift into "anonymity and irresponsibility" (Revising Life 92). Hayman, too, claims that Plath luxuriates in the abdication of responsibility in this poem (155). Significantly, the body that drifts into erasure in "Tulips" is a white body in a white world, a body confronted with entrapment in or escape from its own powerful signifiers. The speaker in the poem claims to understand the tulips as signifiers of a complicated sexual world intruding on the hallowed and clean white world of the hospital. She suggests that she might elude the seductiveness of the tulips should she become a nun and regain purity. This reading of the poem works well enough; however, when we read the poem with an eye toward racial signifiers, the poem situates the plight of many white women who ardently desire an escape from culpability in white dominance over others. Dyer argues that white women are partially responsible for white dominance, but that because of their marginal status in relationship to white men, the only way they can maintain their own honor as white women is to do nothing about their role in domination (206). Thereby, the exquisite and languorous passivity that Plath demonstrates in "Tulips" marks white women as the culpable incapables that they are in the face of white dominance. The tulips remind the woman in the poem of other worlds, of other lives, of a colorfulness outside herself, but the woman cannot acknowledge these worlds and maintain her white passivity simultaneously. She would have to sacrifice the peacefulness of whiteness. The tulips signify, by their glorious and bold colors, glaring Otherness. The frustrated speaker of the poem prescribes an enslavement for them uncannily linked to Africa: "The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; / They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat. " Annas rightly notes that the speaker experiences an obligation to choose between the two worlds—the white world and the colorful world (A Disturbance 98)—however, I find that the speaker clearly wishes she did not have the choice. She prefers to imprison the dangerous and colorful world, so that she may remain passively white. Perloff reads the white world of the hospital into which the colorful tulips intrude as a "dead, " "dazed, " and "empty" one. She reads the tulips as the entity that will force the speaker out of her whiteness (119). But I contend that in the final stanza only the image of the imprisoned tulips permits the speaker to associate the red of the flowers with the red of her heart. Figuratively speaking, Otherness may only serve as a catalyst for white inspection once it is safely ensconced behind bars. from White Women Writing White: H. D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, and Whiteness. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Renèe R. Curry

• contemporary responses to her writing

Plath has often been grouped into the confessional movement of poetry. One of the reasons for this classification is that she wrote extensively of her own life, her own thoughts, her own worries. Any great artist both creates his or her art and is created by it, and Plath was always endeavoring to know herself better through her writing. She tried to come to terms with her personal demons, and tried to work through her problematic relationships. For instance, she tried to understand her ambivalence about motherhood, and tried to vent her rage at her failed marriage. However, her exploration of herself can also be understood as an exploration of the idea of the self, as it stands opposed to society as a whole and to other people, whom she did not particularly like. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that even Plath's children seemed to be merely the objects of her perception, rather than subjective extensions of herself. The specifics of Plath's work were drawn from her life, but endeavored to transcend those to ask more universal questions. Most infamously, Plath imagined her self as a Jew, another wounded and persecuted victim. She also tried to engage with the idea of self in terms of the mind and body dialectic. "Edge" and "Sheep in Fog" explore her desire to leave the earthly life, but express some ambivalence about what is to come after. "Ariel" suggests it is glory and oneness with nature, but the other two poems do not seem to know what will happen to the mind/soul once the body is eradicated. This conflict - between the self and the world outside - can be used to understand almost all of Plath's poems.

• attitudes to women and to the position of women writers in the Fifties and Sixties.

Plath lived and worked in 1950s/1960s England and America, societies characterized by very strict gender norms. Women were expected to remain safely ensconced in the house, with motherhood as their ultimate joy and goal. Women who ventured into the arts found it difficult to attain much attention for their work, and were often subject to marginalization and disdain. Plath explored and challenged this reductionist tendency through her work, offering poems of intense vitality and stunning language. She depicted the bleakness of the domestic scene, the disappointment of pregnancy, the despair over her husband's infidelity, her tortured relationship with her father, and her attempts to find her own creative voice amidst the crushing weight of patriarchy. She shied away from using genteel language and avoided writing only of traditionally "female" topics. Most impressively, the work remains poetic and artistic - rather than political - because of her willing to admit ambivalence over all these expectations, admitting that both perspectives can prove a trap.

Hughes' interest in prehistory, myth, shamanism and the supernatural

Studied anthropology at Cambridge. Shaman - a sort of tribal witch-doctor or healer, among certain peoples in Asia and the Americas. Shamans pass through initiations, ascend to the heavens or descend to the underworld, encounter monsters and spirits of the dead, are instructed by sacred beasts in hidden mysteries, and return under obligation to chant their secrets to the uninitiated. -This role in a modern society is played by the poet, whose sufferings and spiritual adventures provide the equivalents of the shaman's vision. if a poem was good enough, it could summon the spirit of a real animal. He also thought that dreams, shamanic visions, and encounters with spirits were important for the imagination of a poet. From adolescence, he had recurrent dreams of pike, salmon, and foxes. Some of his poems were, according to him, written at the suggestion of spirits contacted through a ouija board. 'Living medicine' 'Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry this healing. Poetry does it more intensely'

Hughes' early experience of growing up in Yorkshire

Was born in 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a large village in Yorkshire. At seven years old, his family moved to Mexborough in South Yorkshire, where they ran a newspaper and tobacco shop. As a child, he was fascinated by animals. Growing up in the valleys and moors, he often acted as a retriever while Gerald shot small creatures like magpies, owls, curlews and rats. He also loved to fish, to draw, and collect toy animals. At school, he was encouraged by his teachers to write. Very soon, he was drawn towards poetry and mentored by his sister Olwyn, he began to write poems from the age of fifteen. By the time he was sixteen, he had made up his mind to become a poet. 'These towns were surrounded by a very wide landscape of high moorland, in contrast to that industry into which everybody disappeared everyday. They just vanished. If you weren't at school you were alone in an empty wilderness.' Animals 'became a language—a symbolic language which is also the language of my whole life' 'deepest, earliest languages'

Death / relationships / new life / surprising, often controversial imagery / identity / loss / strong emotions / the inner world of feelings / doubt or uncertainty / family / views of the world / nature / the darker aspects of life / the relationship between the individual and nature / settings and landscapes / sorrow or suffering / violence and death / water / senses / trees or flowers

full fathom five and daddy bull moses and lovesong october dawn and wuthering heights tulips