Context & Critic Plath and Hughes Poems

• Thought of the fox as his spirit animal

• He hadn’t written written for a year before this poem

• “As long as a copy of the poem exists…the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness.” - Ted Hughes

• One of the last poems she wrote before she committed suicide

• Written between her and Hughes’ divorce and her death, she felt poetry was her only emotional outlet

• “The poems read as if they were written posthumously” - A Alverez

• Electroconvulsive therapy often caused fractures and dislocations

• Plath hated going to get her electroconvulsive therapy

• “Shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room” - Sylvia Plath

• Plath thought that topics associated with suicide were considered to be taboo

• In the Bell Jar, Esther also tries to drown herself at the coast

• “We are invited to share a sense of the awful chasm” - Jo Gill

Plath was fond of the sea in both life and art. She holidayed on the North Atlantic Coast, the setting became associated with her father

Hughes wrote a sequence of poems which were folk mythology of his own creation. Death and rebirth theme and an exploration into human psyche. He believed his role as a poet is one of a shaman, someone with magical powers who inhabits animals, Jaguar, Hawk Roosting, Wodwo

From the late 60s - early 70s Hughes turned from writing about the natural world to mythical stories

A challenge to Christianity, described it as his masterpiece

The creative experiment was brought to an end with the death of Assia Wevill and her daughter

Was the last poem Plath wrote before she died in 1963. She was found dead 3 days after writing the poem

Lived through WW2, Holocaust would have been seen on television, loss of faith in God due to horrific things, Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Soviet vs West Nuclear threat, Cuban Missile Crisis

Whilst working as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine in New York. She was treated at McLean Hospital. She received electroshock therapy.

Robert Graves “The White Goddess” which was the “Chief poetic book of my consciousness.” His teacher gave it to him. He believed man was too disconnected from nature due to Western Civilisation and Industrialisation.

Hughes was an atheist, however “The White Goddess” may have been a replacement for religion for him, paganism and the concept of death and rebirth through the moon

He believed it was too American. After Ariel was published he was exposed to public scrutiny and put a “self imposed curfew” on himself. However his more confessional poetry “Birthday letters” was published months before he died

Yorkshire moors, engagement with nature and the animal world, worked in a zoo which inspired “Jaguar”

• 1950s America, stigmatised

• Women with these illnesses were seen as a failure as they could not live up to their domestic roles

• Robert Lowell’s confessional movement in late 1950s where poets spoke honestly about their life and psychological battles

• Anne Sexton was a confessional poet Plath borrowed from in “Daddy” with the poem “My Friend, My Friend”

“Gives the naked emotion direct”

• Published after Plath committed suicide although she explored the topic in “The Bell Jar”

• Revealed many US women were unhappy with their lives after surveying Smith College Classmates

• The Feminine Mystique describes the assumption that women were fulfilled from housework and children

“uniformly bleak” - Warren

• Visited Hughes’ childhood home and after an argument went alone in the moors

• Inspired by Wuthering Heights