Abstract
When Plath’s Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, that award re-established the importance of her writing and helped to cut through the sense of legend that the first publication of Ariel in 1965, two years after her suicide, had initiated. Those Ariel poems, important as they were, were so immediately, so intimately, tied to her death that readers found it difficult to cornprehend such poems as “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Words,” “Edge” and the others without remembering her end.
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Notes
Katha Pollitt, “A Note of Triumph” [The Nation 234 (January 16, 1982)], in Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Boston: G.K. Ha1l,1984), p. 69.
Dave Smith, sylvia Plath, me Electric Horse [American Poetry Review (January 1982)], in Sylvia Plath, The Critical Heritage, ed. Linda W. Wagner (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 273.
Michael Kirkham, “Sylvia Plath” [Queen’s Quarterly (Spring 1984)], ibid., p. 277.
William H. Pritchard, “‘An Interesting Minor Poet?’” [New Eepublic (December 30, 1981)], ibid., p. 268.
Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen V. Kukil (New York: Random House, 2000), p. 422.
Ted Hughes, “Sam,” Birthday Letters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), p. 11.
Janet Burroway, “I Didn’t Know Sylvia Plath,” Five Points (Summer 2001), p. 45.
Katha Pollitt, “Peering Into the Bell Jar,” New York Times Book Review (March 1, 1998), p. 4. 20. Calvin Bedient, “Minotaur Baby,” Nation (April 20, 1998), p. 25.
Jack Kroll, “Answering Ariel,” Newsweek (February 2, 1998), p. 59. 22. Michiko Kakutani, “A Portrait of Plath in Poetry for Its Own Sake,” New York Times (February 13, 1998), p. B43.
Ted Hughes, “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother,” Birthday Letters, p. 195.
Frieda Hughes, “Readers,” Wooroloo (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 61.
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© 2003 Linda Wagner-Martin
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Wagner-Martin, L. (2003). The Usurpation of Sylvia Plath’s Narrative: Hughes’s Birthday Letters . In: Sylvia Plath. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505926_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230505926_13
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