The Poetic Dialogue of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

FAIN: FB-52483-06

Heather Lenore Clark
Marlboro College (Marlboro, VT 05344-9888)

My study is an exploration of the poetic dialogue between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In the wake of the publication of "Birthday Letters," as well as the deposit of Hughes’s papers at Emory, it is time for a reappraisal of Plath and Hughes’s literary partnership, one which makes use of new archival material, new theories of collaboration and new voices in Plath and Hughes criticism. This reappraisal will reveal the extent to which Plath and Hughes engaged in a complex and continually evolving poetic dialogue about the anxieties of poetic partnership itself.