Sylvia Plath's Aerial Poetics (2025)

The poetry of Sylvia Plath

2006

The Deaths of Poetry: Sylvia Plath and the Ethics of Modern Elegy

Textual Practice, 2006

Of Poetry And Death - Decoding Sylvia Plath

Finding Sylvia: A Journey to Uncover the Woman within Plath's Confessional Poetry

2017

History and a Case for Prescience: Short Studies of Sylvia Plath's 1956 Poems

This is an excerpt of my work unlocking Plath's work from 1956-1963, outside of Ariel, using Qabalistic methods. For more information, please visit www.fixedstarsgovernalife.com.

Emotion and Physicality in Sylvia Plath's Late Poems

Fuzzy Boundaries in Discourse Studies, 2019

The present chapter examines representations of affect and emotion in Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips” and “The Rabbit Catcher.” One area of fuzziness addressed here is the conceptual distinction between affect and emotion in affect studies. Affect as a preconscious experience is contrasted here with emotion conceived as socially coded and conscious phenomenon. Another fuzzy territory in terms of methodology is the relationship between discourse studies and the affective turn, with affect theorists turning away from representational practices. The present chapter argues that emotion is fundamentally social and forms part of discursive practices in society. Moreover, the textual analysis of poems requires an acknowledgement of the validity of representation. In particular, three types of discourse and the emotions they engender are considered, opposed to which the speaker’s affects emerge as counterpoints: the medical, the religious and the sexual discourse. While discourse is applied here in the sense used by cultural theorists, the notion of affect is approached through Spinozist and Deleuzian theories. The first part of the chapter theorises the difference between affect and emotion and discusses the relevance of discourse studies to representations of affect. The second and third parts discuss each of the poems, applying Deleuze’s affect theory and textual analysis. The chapter aims at distinguishing affect from emotion clearly through the close readings of the two poems, applying discourse analysis methods in combination with affect theories in order to highlight the importance of the literary representations of affects.

‘I am learning peacefulness’: Sylvia Plath’s liminal art of (un)living

Journal of Poetry Therapy, 2016

Psychological Study of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

Literature and Psychology explores the relationships between text and reader as well as relationships within the text, with particular emphasis on emotion/affect. One central thematic focus of the course, in addition to affect, will be trauma–an experience of maximal affect and long term disruption. Whether we read to escape, to discover or even to fulfill requirements, we have a purpose, a motive, and more than likely some expectations. Moreover, we have a number of years of existence during which time we have adopted a large variety of rules, and we are likely to apply those rules to any new system we encounter. Generally speaking ,Sylvia Plath is one of those feminists who have sought to represent the suffering of women in a particular world. Focusing on feminist issues through the lens of her own experience, she was equally driven by a desire to achieve this while coping with a desperate lack of self-confidence and low self-esteem. The loss of her father at an early age contributed to her fears of abandonment and insecurity. The point that will receive much emphasis throughout the present paper is her psychological state and its drastic consequences. Nearly all her poems convey a sense of melancholy, gloom and death. In a case like this, poetry is a kind of temporary bulwark against mounting despair and pain.

‘Linguistically Wounded’: Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Sylvia Plath, and the Limits of Poetic Artifice

Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, 2018

Based on the archival evidence of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s annotations to Sylvia Plath’s 1971 collection Winter Trees, as well as a 1972 typescript of Forrest-Thomson’s review of Winter Trees, which she never published, this article argues that Forrest-Thomson’s engagement with Plath’s late poetry played a crucial role in the development of her theory of ‘poetic artifice’. Yet I contend that the poems of Winter Trees by no means offer themselves as self-evident exemplars of such a theory, and I explore this disjunction by juxtaposing Forrest-Thomson’s revisionary account of Plath in Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, which posits the poems ‘Daddy’ and ‘Purdah’ as anti-confessional works of art that clearly indicate their own ‘unreality’, against the Winter Trees review, which is more critical of Plath’s ‘compromises’. Because Forrest-Thomson’s aesthetic project is further complicated by her own development as a poet, I also consider a selection of poems published in the 1974 Omens Poetry Pamphlet Cordelia: or ‘A poem should not mean but be’, in order to explore an elided, yet suggestive, relation between feeling and theory in her poetry. Finally, I argue that this relation, which Plath’s ‘Purdah’ would seem to both prefigure and sanction, signals the presence of a reticent ‘linguistic emotionality’ in Forrest-Thomson’s work that not only contests the authority of her male modernist models, but also anticipates contemporary critical discourses in experimental poetry and poetics.

The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes by Heather Clark

Review of English Studies, 2012