A Visit with Doris Lessing
Meeting her at last I felt almost faint—certainly unreal—turning transparent myself in the presence of this totally defined, self-confident, gracious woman.
Joyce Carol Oates on Sylvia Plath
Joyce Carol Oates’s extensive essays and reviews of Sylvia Plath’s work.
Winter Trees
The poems in this final volume of Sylvia Plath’s work were all written during the last year of her life, and are therefore products of the same anguished, meticulous imagination that created the famous Ariel
One For Life, One For Death
Read together, these two excellent books cause us to ask ourselves one of the riddles of life: Why is the experience of one human being so vastly different from that of another? Why, in two sensitive, intelligent, gifted women poets should the energies of art be so differently employed? Where one discovers in nature a “presence” of “something else that went before” (Kumin in “The Presence”), the other discovers a helpless “blue dissolve” and shadows “chanting, but easing nothing” (Plath in “Winter Trees”).
Haunted Sylvia Plath
This immensely gifted and ambitious poet, thirty years old, in a paroxysm of domestic unhappiness, emotional crisis, and physical breakdown, gassed herself in the depths of a bitter winter in London 1963, shortly after having written a number of extraordinarily powerful poems—the very poems, white-hot, venomous, self-lacerating, that would make her posthumous fame.
Uncensored Sylvia Plath
“I am made, crudely, for success,” Plath stated matter-of-factly in her journal in April 1958. Yet Plath could not have foreseen that her success would be almost entirely posthumous, and ironic: for, by killing herself impulsively and dying intestate, she delivered her precious fund of work, as well as her two young children Frieda and Nicholas, into the hands of her estranged husband …
The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
The cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The “I” of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature …
What is the Fear?
The immediate reaction on Twitter and in the traditional media was ironic indeed, though unsurprising: a massive stream of insults and threats. One could describe it as puritanical & punitive (in a joyous, celebratory kind of way). Ironic, too, that a parallel twitter conversation was happening on the topic of public shaming and free speech.
Into the Void: Lovecraft and the World Fantasy Award
Lovecraft differs in degree but not in kind from racism/anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Jack London, Hemingway & many, many more.
“At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her”: Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, Faulkner
The paradox with which the feminist critic or sympathizer must contend is this: that revolutionary advances in literature often fail to transcend deeply conservative and stereotypical images of women, as if, in a sense, the nineteenth century were eerily superimposed upon even the most defiantly inventive literary “visions” of the twentieth century.
Drowned at Birth
So we know, we are blessed! We are very special amid so many millions drowned in the Hai River as in the great Yangtze and how many millions perished in the Revolution of no more consequence than infant girls extinguished before they can draw breath or cry.
Celestial Timepiece 