Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Sylvia Plath had an absorbent imagination.She took in the books and poems she read, the art and films she saw, what she observed and experienced firsthand, and appropriated what was useful in her own writing-transforming it in the process.In this way, she was a "great light borrower," as she says in "The Rival" (Collected Poems 166).She freely borrowed words, phrases, images, and ideas from other poets.In the texts she read and studied, evidence of her "light borrowing" abounds.When I read the first line of Thomas Hardy's "On the Esplanade"-"The broad bald moon edged up"-I can't help but hear Plath's "bald and wild" moon from "The Moon and The Yew Tree" (Hardy 39, Collected Poems 173).When I read Wallace Stevens, a poet Plath venerated, and come across "Herr Doktor" in his "Delightful Evening," it's impossible not to hear the voice of Lady Lazarus (Stevens 162).Many critics have pointed out that Plath borrowed "blood-jets"
Author: Trinidad, David
Institutions: Columbia College, Columbia University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1568453029