Celebration and Exploration of the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Our first public event of the autumn season is a celebration and exploration of the poetry of Sylvia Plath, one of the most haunting and powerful voices in English poetry of the last century. You are invited to attend the next Stort Poetry Group meeting to share your favourite Plath poems with us all. The meeting will be on Wednesday, October 2, at 7.30 in the Theatre Bar at Rhodes, South Road, Bishops Stortford, which has proved a very acceptable venue.

Sylvia Plath is one of the most individual voices in English poetry, and her life one of the most tragic and controversial of Twentieth-Century poets. Her biographical details are well known – her breakdown and hospitalisation in her native USA written about in her novel The Bell Jar, her romance and marriage with the charismatic poet Ted Hughes, and the breakdown of that marriage, followed by her suicide in London, with her most brilliant volume of poems published after her death. She has been responded to in many different ways – as a feminist heroine, as a feminist martyr, as a confessional poet, as a breath-taking innovator in poetry, as Hughes’ equal or superior as a poet, as his muse, as his victim, as an American poet, as a British poet, or as someone just uniquely herself. 

You can decide for yourself, and share your opinions at the Celebration and Exploration of the Poetry of Sylvia Plath. If you would like to make a more formal presentation of your response to Sylvia Plath as part of the evening, please contact me.  Otherwise, simply turn up at this free event on October 2.