Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T22:57:53.723Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 7 - Sylvia Plath: Being Christlike

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2019

David Troupes
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

Spending equal time with Hughes’s poetry, especially Birthday Letters, and Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose, this chapter examines how the Christological ideas at work in so much of Hughes’s other poetry applies to the life, literary output and tragic death of his first wife. We watch as the Edenic template of the fall repeats in Hughes’s depictions of Plath. Close attention is also paid to Plath’s “Pursuit,” with additional contributions from Yeats and Stevens, setting up a pattern of continual intertextuality. Plath’s foundering efforts to manage and restore her unfallen, divine self produce a range of fascinating effects in both her writing and Hughes’s. These particularly center on a body of landscape poetry written during the couple’s two-year stay in America, and reference is made to the work of artists Thomas Cole and Caspar David Friedrich. The most explicitly Christological of Hughes’s Birthday Letters poems are discussed, and the argument made that his efforts to understand what happened to Plath in terms of a “symbolic death and rebirth” send him continually, though never with total satisfaction, to the Christian template.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×