Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Natalie Harris (essay date 1983)

Natalie Harris (essay date 1983)

”The Naked and the Veiled: Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson in Counterpoint,” Dickinson Studies, No. 45, June, 1983, pp. 23-34.

[In the following essay, Harris compares Dickinson's response to death with that of poet Sylvia Plath as seen in their poems, finding that Plath tends to be more explicit and Dickinson more transcendent in their attitudes.]

Among American poets, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath form an idiosyncratic pair. They happen to have written their best poetry when they were the same age, one century apart, but they are connected more profoundly by their struggles against forces that seemed to carry the weight of fate. They wrote poems on many of the same themes, notably the extremist ones of death, pain, and love lost. They each made innovative use of domestic, religious, and nature imagery. Above all, they resemble one another in the peculiar pressure they put on language to generate...

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