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Amazon.co.uk Review
"We have grown accustomed to confession", writes Erica Wagner at the very beginning of Ariel's Gift, an extensive commentary on Ted Hughes' acclaimed Birthday Letters, published in the last year of his life in 1998. Exploring the powerful image of the destructive, and poetic, couple through the life and writing of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Wagner situates Birthday Letters as a type of conversation: Hughes' engagement with the legacy of his wife's poetry as well as her suicide, his "return" to Plath's writing--her titles, words, phrases haunting his--as well as the drama of her life.
In this sense, Ariel's Gift is suspended between two traditions of reading, tracing both the literary dialogue between poets and poems and the life--the biographical, and personal, incident--that goes into the writing. Responding to the lure of Plath's intense, even selfless, exposé of self in her writing, as well as to what was felt to be Hughes's breaking of his 30-year silence about their relationship, Wagner provides a chronological account of the relationship between the two poets--an account which then frames her readings of the poems included in Birthday Letters. This is not, however, an attempt to reduce lyric poetry to personal experience. Wagner's reading is always alert to the ways in which Hughes is (re)working Plath's poetry and sensitive to fact that the "memory of Sylvia Plath, and her legacy, does not belong solely to Hughes". Read as a dialogue not only with Plath but with the broader cultural controversy which surrounds his relationship to Plath's work, Wagner explores the complex texture of Birthday Letters as Hughes's final tribute to a unique poetry. --Vicky Lebeau --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
Erica Wagner provides a comprehensive guide to the poems that must constitute one of the most extraordinary and powerful volumes published in the last century. When Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters was published in 1998, it was greeted with astonishment and acclaim. Few suspected that Ted Hughes had been at work, for a quarter of a century, on a cycle of poems addressed almost entirely to his first wife, the American poet Sylvia Plath. In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner offers a commentary on the poems, pointing the reader towards the events that shaped them, and, crucially, showing how they draw upon Plath's own work.
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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book may be useful for general readers as a background for the Birthday Letters poems, grounding each in the biographical facts of Plath and Hughes life together and providing reference points in an easy to read format, but it has many failings. Anyone who has read Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame Plath biography will not need to read this book; it becomes obvious that Wagner's book was written using only three texts as research - Birthday Letters, Ariel, and Stevenson's book. It is a lazy reproduction of anothers argument, little more than a sixth formers essay. Anyone who has read the three books mentioned is wasting their money on this; every point it makes becomes obvious if you know the biography. Use it as a quick reference, not as a good book in it's own right.
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is the first book to deal with the literary sensation that appeared only eight months before the death of its author, Ted Hughes. Although I doubt that this will be the last book to deal with his relationship with the American born poet, Sylvia Plath, I have no doubt that this will remain one of the best. It carefully examines the poems while pointing out the references to their life that litter the poems and pointing out the references to Plath's work as well. Wagner does not take sides,unlike many of the critics and biographers who have gone before her and this is a refreshing change. The introductory chapter, The Ecstasy of Influence, examines the reasons why the book has become such a sensation on both sides of the atlantic and Wagner may well become one of the world's most quoted critics on the subject.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book to gain some insight into the stories behind the poems in The Birthday Letters. Teaching Hughes' poems for the first time, it was a helpful piece of background reading, and followed the same chronological structure as the collection . At times certain interesting poems were glossed over- the emphasis is very much here on the context of the writing rather than the writing itself, and as always Plath dominates the story. Its a well written, highly readable text though, and certainly presents an interesting set of interpretations. Definitely a recommended book for anyone reading The Birthday Letters.
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