Blackberrying (Further Reading)

Further Reading

• Broe, Mary Lynn, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, University of Missouri Press, 1980.

  Broe attempts to demythologize Plath in this study of the themes and techniques in her poetry.

• Davison, Peter, The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston from Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.

  Davison recounts the Boston poetry world of the mid-1950s in this memoir, describing the complex relationships among poets such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Richard Wilbur, and W. S. Merwin.

• Malcolm, Janet, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, Knopf, 1994.

  Malcolm’s controversial “biography” addresses how Plath’s reputation developed after she had died. Malcolm examines the complex and complicated relationship Plath’s ex-husband, Ted Hughes, had with Plath’s estate, and the steps he took to protect his own privacy.

• Rosenblatt, Jon, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

  Arguing that criticism on Plath has been “tendentious and extra literary,” Rosenblatt reads Plath’s poems as enacting a private ritual process of death and rebirth.