Ted Hughes and the corpus of Sylvia Plath

(58.) Plath of course utters just such a warning in "Lady Lazarus" but she, appropriately enough, enjambs the line, figuratively breaking the masculine literary tradition apart. This point is also noted by in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "In Yeats's House: The Death and Resurrection of Sylvia Plath," in No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 290.

(59.) Marjorie Perloff, "The Two Ariels: The (Re)making of the Sylvia Plath Canon," American Poetry Review (November-December 1984): 10, where she locates the beginning of the Plath "myth" with Lowell's words. She merely quotes, however, without commentary, the notorious statement that Plath was "hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another `poetess,' but one of those super-real hypnotic, great classical heroines," Katha Pollitt, "A Note of Triumph," in Ariel Ascending, ed. Alexander, 94, similarly notes Lowell's comparison of Plath to "Dido, Phaedra, Medea" without considering the implications of equating suicide and murder.

(60.) Robert Lowell, Foreword, Ariel, by Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), vii.

(61.) Ted Hughes, "Publishing Sylvia Plath," reprinted in Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 165.

(62.) Ibid., 167.

(63.) Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," 79.

(64.) Ted Hughes, Introduction, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings, by Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 19.

(65.) Idem.

(66.) Hughes's self-legitimating judgments get more embedded in the texts as the years pass: in this collection (as has been noted by Jacqueline Rose), Hughes divides Plath's writings into "The More Successful Short Stories and Prose Pieces," and "Other Stories."

(67.) Hughes, Introduction, The Collected Poems, by Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1981), 16.

(68.) See, for the first, Malcolm, 3-7; for the second, Nancy Milford, "The Journals of Sylvia Plath," in Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1984), 81-83, and Steven Gould Axelrod, "The Second Destruction of Sylvia Plath," American Poetry Review (March-April 1985): 17-18.

(69.) Hughes, Foreword to journals, xiv-xv.

(70.) See, for example, Rose, 82: "There is, therefore, a set of decisions being taken here [in Hughes's writings on Plath] as to whether, and to what extent, Plath can be allowed to be low-low as in nasty, low as in the degradation of culture."

(71.) Malcolm, 66.

(72.) Hughes, Foreword to journals, xiv-xv.

(73.) Hughes, "Sylvia Plath and Her journals," 155.

(74.) Ibid., 154.

(75.) Malcolm, 158.

(76.) Hughes. "Sylvia Plath and Her Journals," 157-64.

(77.) Ted Hughes, "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace," The Guardian (April 20, 1989): 22.

(78.) Ted Hughes, "On Sylvia Plath," Raritan 14.2 (1994): 2-3.

(79.) Ibid., 9; his emphasis.

(80.) Malcolm, 45.

(81.) Hughes, "On Sylvia Plath," 4.

(82.) Hughes, "The Art of Poetry," 77.