Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table

(Hardback)

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Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Writing Between Them: Turning the Table examines early draft manuscripts and published poems by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in order to uncover the compositional approaches that they held in common. Both poets not only honed the minutiae of individual poems but also reworked the shape of overall sequences in order to cultivate unique theories of an ars poetica. The book incorporates drafts of their work from Indiana Universitys Lilly Library, Emory Universitys Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Smith Colleges Mortimer Rare Book Room, and the British Library. After assessing the writing and revision strategies that the poets early drafts reveal, the book investigates the material that they borrowed from one another and then reimagined through two major sequences: Plaths Ariel and Hughess Crow. The book enhances its analysis of the poets shared techniques by discussing several pairs of poems from Ariel and Hughess Birthday Letters that respond to one another. Its final chapter also includes an evaluation of some of Hughess unpublished journal entries and unpublished letters that comment on his last collections public reception. In the conclusion, the author chronicles Hughess and Plaths own remarks on their writing process as further evidence of their ars poetica.

Reviews

Significantly contributing to the literary-critical and archival-based scholarship in both Plath studies and Hughes studies, Jennifer Ryan-Bryants Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Writing Between Them: Turning the Table focuses our attention in compelling fashion on Hughess and Plaths poetry and attendant poetics, histories, and contexts, while offering new readings of poems spanning the poets careers in the process. This book will be of great interest to readers and scholars who want to know more about how various poetry collections by Plath and Hughes came into being and how we can conceptualize Plaths and Hughess ars poeticas within the contexts of their own and each others bodies of work.

Author Bio

Jennifer Ryan-Bryant is professor of English at SUNYBuffalo State.