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LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN (ESSAY DATE 1999)

SOURCE: Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Plath’s Poems about Women.” In Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, pp. 95-105. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.

In the following chapter from her critical biography of Plath, Wagner-Martin offers an overview of Plath’s poems involving female figures, noting the poet’s emphasis on the themes of physical perfection, fertility, barrenness, and motherhood.

Even while the reader can find in Hughes’s lists some themes that would feed into Plath’s poetry, the discrepancy between those collective lists and the poems she began writing, and continued to write, starting in 1959 is noticeable. Whereas most of Hughes’s ideas for subject matter were historically or geographically based, with a strong component of trees, animals, and natural scenes, many of the poems Plath wrote during these years were about women—women either...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Sylvia Plath (Novel Date 1963)
4. General Commentary
   1. Christina Britzolakis (Essay Date 1999)
   2. Linda Wagner-Martin (Essay Date 1999)
5. Title Commentary
   1. "Ariel"
   2. The Bell Jar
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Feminism