ENGL 356(F) Dead Poets' Society (Same as Women's and Gender Studies 356)
Ted Hughes's publication of Birthday Letters in January, 1998, was portrayed in
the press and reviews as breaking a 35-year silence on his wife Sylvia Plath's
suicide in 1963. What made this volume of poems a bestseller was its confessional and biographical drama. Hughes addresses his dead spouse and returns to
all of the major events in their shared life, simultaneously exposing his feelings
and intuitions about what went wrong in their marriage and why Plath was driven to take her life. Less evident to the general reading public was that Birthday
Letters extends a dialogue between Plath and Hughes on the nature of poetry
and poetic identity that began in their courtship. Plath felt that Hughes initiated
her into a strong feminine voice, and she, in turn, was responsible for introducing Hughes's poems, perceived as infused with violence and virility, to an
American audience. The poems that made Plath famous posthumously, however, were those written in response to her separation from Hughes and to his extramarital affair, and were collected in a volume titled Ariel that was altered by
Hughes and published after her death. This course will explore the Plath-Hughes
marriage, both biographically and poetically. Topics may include: the conflict
between Plath's confessional sensibility and Hughes's sense of her intrusion on
their private life; the role of biography generally in literary interpretation; the vilification of Hughes by feminists and the impact they had on both his poetry and
the way he published Plath's poems, journals, and novel; and the extent to which
some of Hughes's final publications constitute "having the last word" on both
personal and poetic disagreements with his dead wife.
Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: active participation in class, one 4-
to 5-page paper; one 6- to 8-page paper, two oral presentations in class. There
will also likely be a field trip to Smith to look at the Plath archive.
Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 15.
Sophomores intending to apply to the Williams-Exeter program may find this
course of special interest, since there will be an international conference on
Plath and Hughes at Oxford in October 2007 in which they may be invited to
participate.