The following excerpt is taken from an interview with Ted Hughes published in the Paris Review, Spring 1995.


INTERVIEWER: You have been associated with Mark Strand and W.S. Merwin. How do you see their work as compared to yours?

HUGHES: I know Merwin’s work pretty well. Mark Strand’s less well, though I look at it very closely wherever I find it. I’ve been close to Bill Merwin in the past. I got to know him in the late fifties through Jack Sweeney who was then running the Lamont Poetry Library at Harvard. They had a house in London, and when Sylvia and I got back there in late 1959 they helped us a lot, in practical and other ways. Dido Merwin found us our flat, then half furnished it, then cooked things for Sylvia in the run up to our daughter being born. That was the high point of my friendship with Bill. He was an important writer for me at that time. It was a crucial moment in his poetry - very big transformations were going on in there; it was coming out of its chrysalis. And I suppose because we were so close, living only a couple of hundred yards apart, his inner changes were part of the osmotic flow of feelings between us. Very important for me. That’s when I began to get out of my second collection! of poems and into my third - which became the book entitled Wodwo. He helped me out of my chrysalis, too. Part way out. And he was pretty important for Sylvia a little later, when the Ariel poems began to arrive in early 1962. One of the hidden supply lines behind Ariel was the set of Neruda translations that Bill did for the BBC at that time. I still have her copy. It wasn’t just Neruda that helped her. It was the way she saw how Bill used Neruda. That wasn’t her only supply line, but it was one. I think Bill’s traveled further on his road than any contemporary U.S. or British writer I can think of. Amazing resources and skills.
Leggi il resto di questo articolo »

S. Plath online essays and papers
di Pamela J. Annas

Intervista a Sylvia Plath

A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr

ORR: Sylvia, what started you writing poetry?

PLATH: I don’t know what started me, I just wrote it from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I’ve been a bit of a professional.

ORR: What sort of thing did you write about when you began?

PLATH: Nature, I think: birds, bees, spring, fall, all those subjects which are absolute gifts to the person who doesn’t have any interior experience to write about. I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

ORR: Now, jumping the years, can you say, are there any themes which particularly attract you as a poet, things that you feel you would like to write about?

PLATH: Perhaps this is an American thing: I’ve been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell’s poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Ann Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman4ike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting.
Leggi il resto di questo articolo »