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1 results

  • Chapter 33 - After Plath: The Legacy of Influence

  • from Part VIII - The Creative Afterlife
  • Edited by Tracy Brain, Bath Spa University
  • Book:
    Sylvia Plath in Context
    Published online:
    03 August 2019
    Print publication:
    22 August 2019, pp 350-359

  • Summary

    Fiona Sampson looks beyond any simplistic account of legacy in her nuanced tracing of Plath’s continuing influence on British poetry. While Plath left no substantial or explicit articulation of her poetics, her early published work indicates some of her own literary debts. The free verse which eventually muscles its way out of that initial formality is closely related, in both rhythm and register, to exactly contemporary work by Ted Hughes. Almost universally read by contemporary British poets, she contributes a Plathian dimension to contemporary British poetics as a whole. This is less apparent in today’s Confessional free verse, which owes much to life writing and oral forms, than in the continuation, alongside the Hardy/Larkin mainstream, of a more risk-taking, symbolic and higher-register tradition. Its protagonists include Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Selima Hill and Denise Riley.