wich book do u recomend me to start????

i read some random poetry of her-

but what should be the FIRST book to read???


Luv!!!

errr.

Ariel.

=)

Without knowing thougt the same!!!!

lUv!

Definitely. Or The Collected Poems. My copy is in tatters I've read it so much.
I liked the Bell Jar, but I can understand some people who didn't - it's not the greatest novel.
Does anyone have Johnny Panic? With the piece of the novel she was writing when she died? It's disappointing she never got to establish herself more as a novelist aswell as a poet as it seems that that's what she really wanted. I love her ambition and dedication to her craft. So many people cling to her subject matter and rehash the depression stuff and overlook how wonderful her poems are outside of that. I love their colour and their music. She's one of my favourite writers, not just because I relate to some of the things she's writing about but because of how she's writing about it. I think she's really accessible to alot of people, even if they're not particularly into poetry, but there's also a reason she's on alot of English/American Lit courses, because she is a great poet.

[quote=Hedgehog]Definitely. Or The Collected Poems. My copy is in tatters I've read it so much.
I liked the Bell Jar, but I can understand some people who didn't - it's not the greatest novel.
QUOTE]


Thank u guyz!!!!

now it a big mmm i dunno how to say it in english but a place really big big place where u can find all the editorials & buy books a lil bit cheaper!!!

So Ariel its the answer...

Lotta Love!!!

I have the collected poems of Plath. I think it's great. Especially since I can't afford to buy each of her poetry collections yet. *hehe*

Oh, LorettasRape- I hope I'm not too late. But I sugest that you get The restored Edition of Ariel. It's awesome.


I do. I recently ordered it on line. I've only read a few of the stuff on it. I thought it was intresting to read more of her work- other than poetry. I really have to get her journals.

Btw- has anyone read "the birthday Letters" by Ted Hughes?

I became a Sylvia Plath fan for anything BUT the reasons people are meant to become Sylvia Plath fans. I find a lot of her writing amusing and engaging, exceptionally witty and at times positively hilarious. There are parts in The Bell Jar and even plenty in the Ariel poems that I still can re-read and laugh out loud over; there's a great deal in her 'late' poems that is chilling and surreal (and brilliant for it) but a lot else where she is describing some shitty, mundane experience - being with an annoying guy, an annoying girl, annoying relatives, getting drunk, making a fool of yourself, being stuck in a house bored and popping pills for some reason or other. Plath captures things like this with such a wry, sardonic precision. She mercilessly takes the piss (most would say 'sneers') and rolls her eyes at everyone and everything.
There's a hell of a lot else besides this that I love about her writing, but her sense of the absurd was what initially got me hooked.

i have it. i think it's lovely and some of the novels are great, especially the late ones. actually i prefer poetry over prose, but this an excellent book, even though it has the usal ted hughes introduction (i can't stand him).

Sylvia Plath used to use a theasaurus in the beginning. She was not familiar with many words and tried her best to conform to the high standard of literary genius at the time. How ever, this did teach her a grasp of the English language which she eventually used to her success with out any material aids.

I am not a fan of her work but I find the stories harrowing such as that she used to cut her thighs to ribbons with razor blades and eventually taped the doors of the room the children were in to protect them and killed herself in the gas oven.

Her life was fraught with frustrations of living in a male dominated world where women were second class citizens especially in the establishment.

She is an iconic figure but I do realise there are many better writers out there - Baudlaire (sp) is a favourite of mine.

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Fair enough. So long as nobody comes in and uses phrases like
"unfair vilification of Ted Hughes

or claims that right about now, a Plath fan is at her grave trying to chip off the "HUGHES" in the inscription reading "SYLVIA PLATH HUGHES", I won't take issue if someone posts that they think Plath sucks.
But I take offense when I hear that anybody in any way critical of Ted Hughes is a nutter.
The story about her grave being vandalized has become a set piece in the Sylvia Plath 'biography', oxymoronic as this would seem.
The grave was 'vandalized', but nobody knows who did it and it happened about 20 years ago.

I absolutley love "daddy" its one of my favourite poems ever, those last few lines give me goosebumps. I finished reading her biography last week its so tragic what happened to her

well said. I agree witht this one. i think this is why she has so many fans of her work.

I love her poetry because of the ideas she conveys within it about death, the self, gender roles... etc.

I find Daddy truly amazing. I haven't really admired her work from a such a critical way before... but now I'm doing a research/ critical paper on her work. I've come to admire it more than I did two years ago.

I also admire Ted's poetry. Although, I don't really like him personally. I sort of have the same feelings for him as i do for Courtney love sometimes. I love the work... but some of their personal affairs I just don't like.

What I love about Daddy is the emotions and the images we feel while reading it. The tone of the whole poem is just amazing.

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.


I think that's one of my favorite lines from a poem.


And from Pursuit:

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thrist I squander blook;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacriface.

one of my 2 favourite poets the other one being anne sexton
i love daddy, prsuit, the insmoniac, poems for a birthday, tulips, the elm and the cut
someone said they find some of her work funny and i totally agree in places it IS funny in an ironic sort of way.
reading her biography was very sad i wish she'd lived long enough to see how popular her poems and novel became

get her entire collected works!

one of my favourite ever books been searching for johnny panic and the bible of dreams but no luck

Try Amazon.com.

Thanks. "The Tour", written after Ted left, about some annoying aunt visiting, is to me a good example of Plath's dry humour. (The parts I've put in capitals, Plath puts in italics, but I can't be stuffed adding all those fiddly bits just now) :

The Tour
by Sylvia Plath, 1962


O maiden aunt, you have come to call.
DO step into the hall!
With your bold
Gecko, the little flick!
All cogs, weird sparkle and every cog solid gold.
And I in slippers and housedress with no lipstick!

And you want to be shown about!
Yes, yes, this is my address.
Not a PATCH on your place, I guess, with the Javanese
Geese and the monkey trees.
It's a bit burnt-out,
A bit of a wild machine, a bit of a mess!

O I shouldn't put my finger in that
Auntie, it might bite!
That's my frost box, no cat,
Though it LOOKS like a cat, with its fluffy stuff, pure white.
You should see the objects it makes!
Millions of needly glass cakes!

Fine for the migraine or the bellyache. And this
Is where I kept the furnace,
Each coal a hot cross-stitch—a lovely light!
It simply exploded one night,
It went up in smoke.
And that's why I have no hair, auntie, that's why I choke

Off and on, as if I just had to retch.
Coal gas is ghastly stuff.
Here's a spot I thought you'd love—
Morning Glory Pool!
The blue's a jewel.
It boils for forty hours at a stretch.

O I shouldn't dip my hankie in, it hurts!
Last summer, my God, last summer
It ate seven maids and a plumber
And returned them steamed and pressed and stiff as shirts.
I am bitter? I'm averse?
Here's your specs, dear, here's your purse.

Toddle on home to tea now in your flat hat.
It'll be LEMON tea for me,
Lemon tea and earwig biscuits—creepy-creepy.
You'd not want that.
Toddle on home, before the weather's worse.
Toddle on home, and don't trip on the nurse!—

She may be bald, she may have no eyes,
But auntie, she's awfully nice.
She's pink, she's a born midwife—
She can bring the dead to life
With her wiggly fingers and for a very small fee.
Well I hope you've enjoyed it, auntie!

Toddle on home to tea!

Incidentally I have "Johnny Panic ... " There are two versions of it. One has more examples of her prose than the other. Ted Hughes states in his introduction that Sylvia would "never" have published the majority of the stories, so he was doing so "against her better judgement". (Gee, I wonder what his motive was in publishing it at all? )

It would be fascinating if somebody could locate the "missing" manuscript of Plath's second novel, "Double Exposure". Sylvia wrote in numerous letters to people that she'd nearly finished it, that it was in her opinion a LOT better than The Bell Jar and she was far more proud of it. It was all about a "marriage flawed in deceit". She wrote to her mother that far from wanting to forget about her marriage break up, she was "commemorating" it in Double Exposure.
Hughes says in Johnny Panic that he remembered the manuscript being about 130 pages long, but without explanation, adds that it "disappeared" around 1970.

yeh they mentioned the second novel in her biography i'd love to see what it was like

did you have difficulty finding johnny panic? i've searched all the bookstores maybe i should try amazon

Personally I had no trouble finding either version. I stole one copy from the local library. The other, an updated version containing more of her prose, I bought brand new from a bookstore.

The examples of her "popular journalism" and opinion pieces are arguably the most interesting things in "Johnny Panic ... " (Johnny Panic itself is a great short story, but a lot of the others kind of fail to go anywhere.)
"Snow Blitz", a journalistic account of the terrible London winter of 1963, must have been written within weeks, even days, of her suicide. The way you can tell she's aiming to be read by a specific audience and doing such a clever job of it is fascinating. It's evidence of a woman who right up until the end of her life was a million times more interesting than Gwyneth Paltrow! It wasn't Gwyneth's fault, but the way that movie depicted her (and Ted) was more often than not simply infuriating.

Somebody on the "Sylvia Plath Forum" posted the following. Pretty juicy:

"I thought it would be helpful to people to read portions of what Ted wrote Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath after Sylvia’s death, in two letters. As was her usual practice, Aurelia did make annotations on these letters, including an annotation in short hand. From her comments, and from her subsequent comments in letters to Olwyn Hughes, it appears to me that Mrs Plath did not exactly warm to Hughes explanations regarding his behavior, and I am sure some people will also find them self-justifying, but I believe he was writing from the heart and that his grief and remorse were genuine. The letters he refers to must have been the ones that she borrowed/bought the stamps for from her downstairs neighbor on the night of her death. Ted’s reference to Sylvia’s reliance on mood-altering precription drugs has been widely corroborated. Some may recall the downstairs neighbor that the last person to see her described Sylvia as “slurring her words” and appearing “heavily drugged or doped.”


(Ted to Aurelia Plath) March 15, 1963:- I shall never get over the shock and I don't particularly want to. I've seen the letters Sylvia wrote to my parents and I imagine she wrote similar ones to you or worse. The particular conditions of our marriage, the marriage of two people so openly under the control of deep psychic abnormalities as both of us were, meant that we finally reduced each other to a state where our actions and normal states of mind were like madness. My attempt to correct that marriage (Aurelia's annotation: "thru adultery with Assia Wevill?") is madness from start to finish. When all she wanted to say simply was that if I didn't go back to her she could not live. Only in the last month suddenly we became friends, closer than we've been for two years or so. Then suddenly her book about her first breakdown comes out, fifty other hellish details go against her, she became over-agitated, begged me to leave the country because she couldn't bear to live in the same city, her still taking so many different sedatives (this had increased since America), then this. If I hadn't been so blindly involved in the struggle with her, how easily I could have seen through all this! And I had come to the point where I decided we could repair our marriage now. She had agreed to stop the divorce. I had that weekend cancelled all my appointments for the next fortnight. I was going to ask her to come away on the Monday, on holiday, to the coast, some place we had not been. Think of how it must be for me too.

I don't ever want to be forgiven. I don't mean that I shall become a public shrine of mourning and remorse, I would sooner become the opposite. But if there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest, truest spirits alive, and in her last months she became a great poet, and no other woman poet except Emily Dickinson can begin to be compared with her and certainly no living American.


May 13th, 1963 Please, Aurelia, do not make the mistake of thinking that the way I caused Sylvia to suffer was any indication of my real feelings for her, which are simply unaltered (Aurelia's shorthand comment: “Jesus Christ!”) my love for her simply continues. I look on her as my wife and the only one I shall ever marry.



I heart Aurelia's annotations.
I have no doubt that Hughes' grief was genuine, but he was a serial adulterer. Even after Assia Wevill killed herself and his own daughter, he continued to cheat on his wife after her too. (His many affairs are detailed in a posthumous biography, which incidentally is very sympathetic to him too.) Two suicides and his own daughters murder didn't change him.

NOT that I could care less what Ted did with his dick, nor do I think he was the spawn of Satan or a murderer, but the point is, the party line of the Plath estate (Hughes and his sister Olywn) was that he only did the dirty on Sylvia once and was this hen~pecked gentle Yorkshire lad, "driven away" by his emasculating, annoying and obnoxious American bitch wife, Sylvia. It's all in the Hughes sanctioned Plath biography, "Bitter Fame", by Anne Stevenson. Stevenson herself is an excellent writer but the 'memoirs' she was forced by Ted and Olwyn Hughes to include in the book, written by friends of theirs, are SO venomous and unsympathetic towards Sylvia ... it's quite shocking. Not shocking because Sylvia isn't alive to defend herself but because such things appeared in a book commissioned and ultimately sanctioned by Hughes himself. All as he was getting more and more wealthy from her writing.