Why am I passionate about this?
I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.
Willard's book list on the lives and works of English and American poets
Why did Willard love this book?
Sylvia Path (1932-1963) was only thirty when she committed suicide in London.
An American girl, alumna of Smith College, gifted and tortured from the start, she became most famous, after her death, for her novel The Bell Jar and Ariel, her posthumous book of lyrics that contains the much anthologized poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.”
She married the British poet Ted Hughes and bore two children. She and Hughes divorced. Much of her lived life is the material for her wrenching poems.
She was sanctified by the women’s movement, but she was no saint. Her legacy is her work.
And Heather Clark’s massive biography is a marvel of research, energy, sympathy, and literary analysis.
3 authors picked Red Comet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.
'Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath' Ali Smith
*WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021*
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES*
*FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 2021*
Drawing on a wealth of new material, Heather Clark brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath. Refusing to read Plath's work as if her every act was a harbinger…