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“... out characters for a maybe-maybe not novel. At night (in the same room, apparently, where Sylvia Plath wrote ‘The Colossus’ – more broken statuary), I spoke to Carlos about the media company he was building. I liked talking to him. He laughed a lot and never at the wrong time.As a publisher he spoke nonsense, or at any rate he didn’t tell ...”

“... I sit and listen to my own blood, or to someone’s blood. ‘I am no more your mother,’ said Sylvia Plath. ‘I am no more your mother than …’ As for Henrietta – I am pregnant. I cannot conclude. I am lodged at AltaVista 44, a site called ‘What Happens’: it’s the story, among other things, of her revenge. Everything on the Internet is ...”

“... that wasn’t what it was about. The publisher was horrified when he saw the list. ‘Where’s Sylvia Plath? We haven’t even heard of half these people!’ The usual suspects, or most of them, were on board – Stevens, Eliot, Crane, Pound, Williams, there was even a poem of Lowell’s – but not with their standard anthology pieces. About 80 per ...”

“... poets or ‘mid-century’ poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at ...”

“... in the late Fifties in Primrose Hill. ‘I saw the druids at their work, that was great.’ Unlike Sylvia Plath, who lodged on the same patch, Corso’s London period was invisible, his poems hidden away in secondhand anthologies. His life as obscure as that of Beckett’s Murphy. Corso’s sage green novel, The American Express, written for the Olympia ...”

“... Thoreau, a regulated desperation, and trace it as it crackles through screwball and sitcom and Sylvia Plath. How unacceptably appalling it is, to be alive and suffering and mortal; but we are energetic and resourceful creatures, so let us be as seductive and self-marketing about it as we can. The ‘girlish voice’ of one Lorrie Moore ...”

“... lesbians we used to draw our skirts away.’ While she admired certain female writers – H.D., Sylvia Plath and Marguerite Yourcenar, the author of Memoirs of Hadrian, among them – and was alive to the social restrictions imposed on women, she had no time for the ‘bellyaching’, self-pity and ‘defensive stridency’ of the feminist movement.For ...”

“... heels touchingly comic. Pym valiantly kept up with new writers: Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Sylvia Plath, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs. A James Baldwin novel, she wrote to Larkin, quoting the publishers’ blurb, was indeed ‘powerful’. She thought it ‘a very well-written book, but so upsetting – one is really glad never to have had ...”

“... for in the hospital nursery. While spending several days in recovery, she becomes curious – like Sylvia Plath collecting notes for the poem that will become ‘Tulips’ – about the other women in the ward, about their frilled housecoats and kind husbands, especially the ‘sleek woman’ in bed eleven, whose husband visits just to hold her ...”

“... early 1970s. Her topics included writers and fictional characters: the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hedda Gabler and Hester Prynne (hence ‘Xavier’). Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that ...”

“... short-lined, angry poems in which Rich’s politics meshed with the postures and obsessions of Sylvia Plath. Even in her feminist twenties, however, Boland was learning how to ‘relocate ... within the Irish poetic tradition’ without following Rich’s separatist route. She married, moved to the suburbs and discovered the rhythms of family life. At ...”

“... marks that Onegin makes in the margins of his books, and Veuve Clicquot, and English pantaloons. Sylvia Plath once longed to write a poem that might be roomy enough to include a toothbrush. But Pushkin anticipated her: his marvellous picture of Onegin’s dandyish bedroom sees brushes ‘of thirty kinds –/ these for the nails, those for the ...”

“... decide that if you want to read a poet who seriously messes with your head why not just stick with Sylvia Plath. A good honest depressive is, after all, so much easier to handle than a thwarted don and would-be theologian. To like Milton we really need to go right back to the beginning. And by that I do not mean to the birth of the infant John Milton on a ...”

“... in Fitzroy Road with the blue plaque saying that Yeats lived there but with no plaque saying that Sylvia Plath also died there. I look down into the basement where Plath put her head in the gas oven. And there is a gas oven still, only it’s not the Belling or the Cannon it would have been in 1963 but now part of a ...”

“... letters are peppered with references to them. When his wife gave him the unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath for Christmas 2000 – he had taught with Plath at Smith College – he found that she had a number of quite mean things to say about me … such as the claim that I have my hair ‘professionally ...”