Representing Sylvia Plath

"Representing Sylvia Plath." Women: A Cultural Review, 24(2-3), pp. 239–240

Notes

Sally Bayley and Tracy Brain, eds, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 264 pp., ISBN 978 1 10700 675 1, £53

¹Marjorie Perloff, “Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Boston: Hall, 1984) 109–24.

²These poems are “Poppies in July” and “Poppies in October”. However, Flatt provides a cogent account for her inclusion of material from other poems as well, such as having the dancer appear to administer “capsules to herself, an idea prompted by Plath's reference to narcotics in her poem ‘Lesbos’” (220).

³The letters recently appeared in full in Sally Bayley's previous monograph on Sylvia Plath, the exceptional Eye Rhymes. Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual, Eds. Kathleen Connors & Sally Bayley. Oxford University Press (USA), 2007

⁴Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, Ed. Ted Hughes, Faber & Faber, 1998, p. 188. That said, the Winthrop letters could inform an interpretation of Plath's earliest published work, as she placed her first poem, “Poem”, in the Boston Herald when she was eight years old. Connie Ann Kirk, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004) 23.