Bitter Fame

Though Plath has become a modern legendary figure, this is the first fully informed account of her life as a poet. With new material of all sorts, Stevenson recounts the struggle between fantasy and reality that blessed the artist but placed a curse on the woman. Photos.

Voyages over Voices is the first book length critical exploration of the internationally acclaimed American-British poet Anne Stevenson. A past winner of the The Poetry Foundation's Neglected Masters Award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry and the Northern Rock FoundationWriter's Award, Stevenson has long been admired by poets and critics alike as one of the most important contemporary poets on either side of the Atlantic. Angela Leighton brings together a distinguished list of contributors, including Jay Parini, Carol Rumens, Tim Kendall and John Lucas, in a collection that provides a significant and invaluable contribution to understanding Stevenson's work as poet and critic. Voyages over Voices will be requiredreading for scholars contemporary British and American poetry.

This new collection deals with how the language of imagination shapes histories and lives. The Fiction-Makers confirms Stevenson's reputation as a poet of intelligence, brilliant technique and penetrating insight. From reviews of Minute by Glass Minute: "Poems which are so good, so flawlessly pure, that beside them most other contemporary poetry looks patched, clumsy or stuffed."--New Statesman

A biography of the poet from New England, describing her life, accomplishments, and her suicide at thirty.

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more. Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.

"This erudite critical study...breathes new life into Plath scholarship."—Publishers Weekly, starred review 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. "Both narratively engaging and scholastically comprehensive."—Thomas Lynch, Los Angeles Times "Wagner has set the poems of Hughes's Birthday Letters in the context of his marriage to Plath with great delicacy."—Times Literary Supplement

Over the years, Sylvia Plath has come to inhabit a contested area of cultural production with other ambiguous authors between the highbrow, the middlebrow, and the popular. Claiming Sylvia Plath is a critical and comprehensive reception study of what has been written about Plath from 1960 to 2010. Academic and popular interest in her seems incessant, verging on a public obsession. The story of Sylvia Plath is not only the story of a writer and her texts, but also of the readers who have tried to make sense of her life and work. A religious tone and a rhetoric of accountability dominate among the devoted. Questing for the real or true Sylvia, they share a sense of posessiveness towards outsiders or those who deviate from what they see as a correct approach to the poet. In order to offer a new and more nuanced perspective on Plath’s public image, the reception has been organized into interpretive communities composed of critics, feminists, biographers, psychologists, and friends. Pertinent questions are raised about how the poet functions as an excemplary figure, and how – and by whom – she is used to further theories, politics, careers, and a number of other causes. Ethical issues and rhetorical strategies consequently loom high in Claiming Sylvia Plath. The book may be employed both as a guide to the massive body of Plath literature and as a history of a changing critical doxa. Why Sylvia Plath has been serviceable to so many and open to colonization is another way of asking why she keeps on fascinating all kinds of readers worldwide. Claiming Sylvia Plath suggests a host of possible answers. It includes an extensive Plath bibliography.

A major account of modern poetry, from one of its leading figures. James Fenton examines issues of creativity and the 'earning' of success, of judgement, tutorage, rivalry, and ambition. He considers the juvenilia of Wilfred Owen, the 'scarred' lines of Philip Larkin, the inheritance of imperialism, and issues of 'constituency' in Seamus Heaney. The book contains insights into the work of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, D. H. Lawrence, and W. H. Auden.