lettersfromgrace's reviews
114 reviews

Margaret Atwood’s writing style and wordplay never ceases to amaze me; the perverse comedy and irony she can develop are so emotionally provocative— infinitely promoting speculation and exploration. I adored her use of different forms in this text, the chorus of maids employing verse, drama, mock-trials etc. In addition, Atwood’s constant comparison of classicism and the contemporary society asks us if we can see such an act as an anachronism, or really a bearing on our day too. 

If anyone’s writing has the power to save, it is Woolf’s. Time and time she has made me feel understood in each existential crisis, with o to whoms and Scarborough running gold, her love for the women in her life, her philosophy. This account allowed me to understand Woolf through another’s eyes, and like she herself says, people draw different things; but I found myself crying over and over at this, how alive Woolf was, how much strength she had, how much intelligence. I just hope she knew that. I know she did, she was years ahead. 

 
I don’t quite know what to say. I don’t think this entire anthology has quite sunk in yet. Of course, I came to this, an avid reader of Plath having only read Hughes’ Crow prior, and expected criticism to overcome me, naïvely; at points, yes, he seems blithe, his fixation on his wife’s relationship with her father is overblown to the point where he seems to miss the complexity of her emotional state in trying to remove blame from himself— but the entire work stands contrary to that, and I believe Hughes knew any bias he held would be seen, and what would out would be the truth of himself and his relationship to Plath, whether he wanted to face up to that within his lifetime, he wanted it as a legacy; there is so much to critique, but that is because he is being so confessional. The only valid criticism I see of the anthology is just that, his poems are not as sophisticate as Plath’s in their use of the confessional mode, and seem to suggest Hughes was adding insult to injury, laying more bare than he had to, which reaffirms his urgent honesty— I do believe he wants us to consider his need to write this. Aside & onwards, I am so glad I read this poetry collection after having been in love with someone, oh the descriptions of the first stages of their romance, his remembrances of the clothing items she wore, down to the prints on each individual bandanna, he shooing cows away as she read Chaucer, reading Conrad to her as she wove a rug, using language as a talisman to keep curses away that she did not even hear or care for, you can see he did love Plath; I don’t say Hughes was not an adulterer, that the abuse allegations are not incredibly pertinent in how we consider their marriage— but you can see the passion and latent love that tied them into a relationship that by both of them was described as destructive, and yet superficially can seem so pure and typical of two poets. There are depths to everything. His lack of addressing Plath’s miscarriages which cause significant struggle for her & he, I did see as a flaw in his confessional attempt, especially in how tied in they are to her record of his abuse of her in her letters. The symbolism Hughes finds in everyday events is revisionist, of course, but something I as a poet resonate deeply with and wondered, maybe stupidly, if others thought in that way— fatalism is dark, heavy thing, and I think Hughes’ grapples with it without enough scepticism to apply appropriate sentiment. I will probably reread this again, but on glancing at the contents list, my favourite poems were:

The Tender Place
The Owl
Fate Playing
Chaucer
Wuthering Heights
The Blue Flannel Suit
Epiphany
The Gypsy
The Minotaur
Apprehensions
The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother
Red

Ultimately, Hughes is a very complicated man whose actions I rarely support, but his poetry and sense of emotion and symbolism is superlative and his technique when he chooses to exert it through enjambent and fluid punctuation is perfect. I like him as a poet, I can have no opinion on him as a man. A difficult legacy to dissect. 

The most difficult text I have read so far, but so rewarding for all its tumult. I read this solely for it to enrich my student of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and found the parallels seen in Adam and Satan to both Victor and his Creature incredibly interesting. Milton’s characterisation of Satan was deeply intriguing and bore many an incredible line; I can see why the Romantics (especially my dear Lord Byron) made him into a subversively heroic figure. However, I found the complexity of Milton’s portrayal of Eve equally fascinating towards seeing the extent of systematic oppression faced by women in the era, especially when Milton was considered a progressive in his time. Milton’s text had so many echoes of Shakespeare which made it fun to ponder over alongside an Othello essay I have been writing alongside. Whilst the style was difficult, I read 100 pages a day, and got through some tougher passages with the promise of reading more of Ted Hughes’ poems interspersed. I very much recommend. 

Too much like White Nights by Dostoyevsky to be original to me. I think this kind of fiction with its yearning and existential undertones can only really be enjoyed in its novelty. This time I simply found the lead miserable, inert, and the cliché of the man who has one poor experience with a woman and then spends the rest of his life in misery is overdone to the point of exhaustion. Whilst the latent political comments on the Ottoman Empire as the sick man of Europe, queer theory, and regard of gender dynamics on relationships in a Patriarchal society were interesting, and original for the period, in a modern context they are not enough to redeem the text for ultimately falling into such trite clichés. I really wanted to love this, but I did not. 

This was incredible. From the title, all the ideas it evokes, the symbolism, nuances of dialogue, the relationship between comedy and horror, the possible hope to be derived from the ending— just stunning. Such a powerful piece of drama about how marriage is constrained any hierarchical society through the use of layers of allegory. I am glad I chose to read this because of the fact its title referred to one of my favourite writers, it lived up to her. 

another existentialist BANGER. uniting existentialist ethics into modernist literary features with sumptuous protagonists, analogies, & real human relationships. adored. desperate to read more by de beauvoir. 

My introduction to literary criticism, and a beautiful one. I adored these essays and had such fun reading them, even if I disagreed at points with Kendall’s close analysis, such as in the case of Getting There. I found his criticism very tender, with his mentions of sea-changes being especially plathian, and his insistence on showing that Ariel was an expression of hope touching and something that resonated deeply with me. His discussion of the latter poems has definitely prompted me to explore them again. 

I read this in around forty minutes between classes, and so many of the poems were ones I had read before in my explorations of Plath’s Collected Poems. Those that resonated with me first continue to; Mirror, Apprehensions, Widow, In Plaster, The Babysitters, I Am Vertical, being old favourites. The Babysitters, written about her and her dear college friend Marcia, remains a poem that calls me to reflect on my closest friends and want to cherish our time together more. There’s a letter Plath wrote where she says her and— I think it was Marcia— were so cold they shared a pair of socks between them; I thought things like that never happened. They do, friendship is so beautiful and authentic. Widow, and In Plaster are some of Plath’s more feminist poems, and led by her marital experience— the latter is amazing in recourse with Duffy’s Pygmalion’s Bride from The World’s Wife, and the last stanza of the former always takes me out. I remember reading Apprehensions for the first time in tutor during the throes of exam season, before crying to my best friend that I thought all my essays were awful and with no life breathed in, due to that emotional state I think Plath’s almost Platonic meditation on how the body condemns us, and more existentially the crisis of purpose of the soul, resonated with my profoundly. Mirror has some of my favourite lines from Plath:

Whilst I cannot say I felt the same thematic unity in the selection of these poems as I did in Winter Trees, they offer reflections on the nature of mortality, marriage, motherhood, predicting Plath’s Ariel, whilst being the refinement of Plath’s The Colossus voice in poems like The Pheasant, and are beautiful thus in tracking her transformation as a poet. Plath is always a five star, through and through.