“... mid-1970s, the poets I came across were the ones everybody was reading, all published by Faber: Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Robert Lowell and, of course, Heaney. It seems extraordinary, now, that my father had known several of them. Larkin had been his friend in Belfast (and my mother’s boss in the library at Queen’s), and, later, at ...”

“... and incantations’, and the epigraphs, from Sophocles to Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva and Sylvia Plath, deepen the resonance. The Shakespeare scholar knows perfectly what she is doing in reversing the drama of the daughterless father; she had clung to the crumbs and rags of fatherly love and veracity, then has to let them blow away in the ...”

“... of Fitzroy Road and Chalcot Road we meet the poet Jo Shapcott and we walk to the flat where Plath ended her life’). The gentle ‘we’ serves as a disembodied voiceover as we accompany the poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 ...”

“... nude ‘A Man in Pieces’) but forbids him ever to describe her physically. She says she prefers Sylvia Plath to Karl Marx, but appreciates the latter’s notion of a ghost ‘haunting a whole continent’ rather than just an old building or two; during a handjob she tells Saul that ‘a spectre was inside every photograph she developed in the ...”

“... pages I’d worked on at the Observer lay beside me (Ian Hamilton and Ted Hughes on the life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new ...”

“... Women’s Libbers. Hughes was an early target – it appeared that he had not been nice enough to Sylvia Plath. When I quizzed one of the harpies on this score, it turned out that she was getting all her facts direct from the poem ‘Daddy’. ‘That’s good enough for me,’ she squeaked. ‘And anyway, you just have to look at him. Macho ...”

“... and Rushdie, but it’s a pity that all she can shame them with is Marilyn Monroe, Jim Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Marvin Gaye. Being attracted to doomed and self-destructive talents, rather than trudging old plodders who don’t have anything very startling to say, is understandable, but as with the Madonna book, when it comes to self-revelation ...”

“... strangely bulimic in character: Hornbacher crams her text full with quotations from Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, James Agee and Alice through the Looking Glass, adding footnotes that cite the medical or anecdotal literature – gobbets of prose which capture her sense of self, swallowed whole and regurgitated. From the dust-jacket on (Hornbacher is ...”

“... authority of speech we must come closer to our own time – to the poetry of Robert Lowell or of Sylvia Plath. There the language of poetry has the same kind of mesmeric power and the same air of constant danger. But it is, of course, danger of a different kind – the danger that boils up from within and makes living for a poet a hazard which the ...”

“... sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens cremate fields of human snow. One has to go back to Sylvia Plath, born just a few years before Seidel, to find such nose-thumbing at atrocity. Sex is another subject Seidel treats with delicacy: ‘I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman./I should not be looking. It should not be there’; ‘A naked ...”

“... it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of what he called, after ...”

“... girl, from a rich and cultured Ottawa family, and in girlhood a great striver and succeeder, as Sylvia Plath was to be. To this ominous comparison it must be added that Elizabeth is apt to fatigue the reader by her normality, to a greater extent even than do accounts of the American poet. Self-groomed like her hairstyle and worn like a twinset, her ...”

“... inscribed with her signature, as is the sudden aggressive humour of the historical identification. Sylvia Plath is clearly the major presence behind Boland’s evolution from an early rather inert anecdotal and emblematic manner, but the influence never swamps her. She has, throughout, her own individual fix on certain central preoccupations and ...”

“... the will to live to the Father’s age. To be, indeed, Father. Nobody has put it more plainly than Sylvia Plath (‘Daddy, I have had to kill you/You died before I had time’). It all adds up to a pretty straightforward endorsement of father Freud, especially when we arrive at the unknown territory of the Bootman story and find the familiar story ...”

“... Mary’s attempt to drown herself in the Thames. The roll-call of Charlotte Mew, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath is a reminder of other women writers who have preferred oblivion to the burden of great gifts and great unhappiness, as Wollstonecraft twice thought she did. Professor Butler ends her introduction with a quotation from Gladstone, who said that ...”