Handout: Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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ENGL 104A, Discussion Sections 5-5:50 & 6-6:50
Monday November 20, 2006
“Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatening to devour me opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, 73-78
“Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”
John Dryden, “Absalom and Achitophel” (1681-82)
“Considering what one takes to be their subject-matter, her poems, particularly the last ones, are curiously, even jauntily impersonal; it is hard to see how she was labeled confessional. As poems, they are to the highest degree original and scarcely less effective. How valuable they are depends on how highly we rank the expression of experience with which we can in no sense identify, and from which we can only turn with shock and sorrow.”
-Philip Larkin, “Horror Poet” (review of Plath’s Collected Poems, published in 1981)
“The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: he looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.”
Donald Hall, “Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide” (1992)
