Plath, Sylvia (Vol. 5) - Plath, Sylvia 1932–1963
Plath, Sylvia 1932–1963
Ms Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer who lived in England. Her elegant and controlled style belied her images of anger, violence, and pain. Her finest work is the poetic realization of ultimate love and ultimate death. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 19-20.)
The first review I ever wrote of a book of poems was of her first book of poems, that breviary of estrangement (the rhymes are all slant, the end-stop avoided like a reproach), The Colossus…. The conflict, or at least the confrontation between what I should designate the lithic impulse—the desire, the need to reduce the demands of life to the unquestioning acceptance of a stone, "taciturn and separate … in a quarry of silences"—and the impulse to live on, accommodating the rewards as well as the wrecks of existence so that "the vase, reconstructed, houses / the elusive rose": such was the dilemma I glimpsed as...
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