Plath

• The poetry constantly breaks beyond its own persoanl cries of pain and horror' - barbara hardy
• "This willfulness to arise and devour humankind in the form of a fulfilled deity points up the impotence of the traditional concepts of good and evil" - leonard Sanazaro
• Death is preeminent but strangely unoppressive - Newman
• In many instances it is nature who personifies her - Newman
• A controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the boundaries of hope and reality - McClanahan
• The everyday incidents are transformed into the horrifying psychological experiences of the poet - McClanahan
• "Plath makes the self the centre of her poems" - uroff
• 'terrible beauty of death' - Bate
• Plath's poems are "a psychological release." - Bronfen
• "She made language into a verbal assault" - Markey
• Plath's poems about Yorkshire are 'uniformly bleak and negative' - Janice Mackey
• 'She does not flinch from confronting feelings of nihilism and impotence' - warren
• ' she captures the malaise of her generation, caight between the austere aftermath of ww2 and the radical 1960s' - warren
• 'they are full of life and colour, even when the tone is dark and comfortless' - warren
• 'even in poems that suggest the power of enduring strength and maternal love, there is often an undertone of fear or darkness' - warren
• 'oblivion is a state that is sought actively' - warren
• 'vengeful and masochistic female speakers' - warren
• ‘The ideal of romantic love as a myth which trivialises women and makes them

  powerless’ Markey
• ❏ ‘Fascination with the seductive beauty of death’ Faas
• ❏ ‘The avid appetite for life juxtaposed with an equally urgent fascination with death’

  Jane Shilling
• ‘The inextrictable relationship between desire and death’ Bate
• Some saw in plaths work ‘A hankering for androgyny, or at least a desire to escape

  from the narrow, constricting limits of female identity’ Warren
• ‘Her personal ideology ran counter to that of the dominant culture of her time’ Warren
• ‘The natural world often seems to reflect speakers’ moods vividly’ Warren
• ‘It is nonetheless abundantly evident that it is life not death which is celebrated in her

  work’ Markey
• ‘To be a creative woman in a gender-polarised culture is to be a divided self’ Ostriker
• ❏ ‘She made language into a verbal assault’ Markey
• sylvia, a trapped animal - Bate
• ‘Above all, in spite of the prevailing doom evident in her poems, it is impossible that anybody could have been more in love with life, or more capable of happiness than she was’. - Bate