Heather Clark reveals the powerful impact of Plath biographers. Splicing the words pathology, biography, and Plath’s name, she coins the term P(l)athographers. Clark helps us to understand their cumulative practice of distortedly mythologizing Plath and misdirecting readers’ interpretations of her writing. For Clark, Plath’s English Tripos exam at Cambridge offers us more understanding of Plath’s poetics than her relationship with her dead father ever could.

Following Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s lead, Gareth Farmer repositions Plath’s work in experimental British, European and American lineages, testing the complexity of her ‘poetic artifice’ against Forrest-Thomson’s theory and offering ‘other’ intellectual and literary contexts of her work. Such contexts activate alternative questions for the poetry, such as the role and function of form in carrying epistemological and cognitive information, or the ways in which poetry offers a critique of lyric singularity, address and subjectivity. A more sustained concentration on Plath’s poetic artifice offers new intellectual contexts as well as alternative horizons for understanding the afterlife of her work.

Fiona Sampson looks beyond any simplistic account of legacy in her nuanced tracing of Plath’s continuing influence on British poetry. While Plath left no substantial or explicit articulation of her poetics, her early published work indicates some of her own literary debts. The free verse which eventually muscles its way out of that initial formality is closely related, in both rhythm and register, to exactly contemporary work by Ted Hughes. Almost universally read by contemporary British poets, she contributes a Plathian dimension to contemporary British poetics as a whole. This is less apparent in today’s Confessional free verse, which owes much to life writing and oral forms, than in the continuation, alongside the Hardy/Larkin mainstream, of a more risk-taking, symbolic and higher-register tradition. Its protagonists include Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Selima Hill and Denise Riley.