“... peculiar personality before rolling it up into a general statement in the way Larkin liked to do. Sylvia Plath had a stab at that kind of thing with her ‘Daddy’, though she had to pretend he was a Nazi, while Larkin’s dad was the real thing. Still, to anyone (I mean me) whose childhood was more sparsely accoutred with characters, Larkin’s ...”

“... seems in 20 years to have drained away out of the eye of poetry. But it is instructive to compare Sylvia Plath’s ‘Bee’ poems in the earlier anthology, or her famous ‘Blackberrying’, with the poems in the present collection by Penelope Shuttle or Medbh McGuckian. All three poets seem to be doing much the same thing and doing it well. Their ...”

“... she felt there was a good deal she had missed. She had been reading one of the several lives of Sylvia Plath and was actually quite happy to have missed most of that, but reading the memoirs of Lauren Bacall she could not help feeling that Ms Bacall had had a much better bite at the carrot and, slightly to her surprise, found herself envying her for ...”

“... Pink Wool Knitted Dress’, from Birthday Letters, which Watt includes, is an account of his and Sylvia Plath’s wedding. She wore what the title suggests, but beyond repeating the phrase twice within the poem Hughes is terribly vague. Was it long? Did it have sleeves? What shade of pink? He is much too much of a man to notice – though he describes ...”

“... the theatre director Braham Murray, all converged on the Holocaust: Jacqueline with her work on Sylvia Plath, Braham with a concentration camp version of Macbeth and Gillian with a chapter in The Broken Middle on the ‘New Political Theology – Out of Holocaust and Liberation’. Clearly, Jacqueline wrote, the convergence represented ‘a way of ...”

“... a stillbornhung by the feet – lately I have seen itmove, Father.There is something here of Sylvia Plath’s accusatory masochism, even with ‘Father’ standing in for the more leeringly complicit ‘Daddy’. In fact it is strange how little difference the advent of the women’s movement, which has claimed ...”

“... in its way people started wondering who I should do next.I remember your telling me that Sylvia Plath came up.I had the idea of doing her without the last months, you know, of drawing a decent veil over the last months. They weren’t too keen on that.What other suggestions were there?The most serious one was Pound. The idea of going from Lowell ...”

“... as though they were stories, or read real people against fictional characters, like thinking Sylvia Plath is Isabel Archer. I must not speculate too wildly or infer things from their negatives. I mustn’t cover up anything surreptitious that I do. I must try not to extract moral principles from lives. These are hard rules to write under and one ...”

“... not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well attuned to Sylvia Plath’s intensities never quite managed to rise to Trakl; the composer Oliver Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set ...”