Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words [Paperback]

Steven Gould Axelrod (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1992

This is a "biography of the imagination, " an inner narrative of Sylvia Plath's life and work. Combining psychoanalytical, feminist, and intertextual methods, Steven Gould Axelrod traces what Roland Barthes has called "the body's journey through language." After an introductory look at the roles played by language and silence in Plath's verbal universe, Axelrod explores the ways in which the poet's father -- and father figures, including male literary precursors -- interfered with her imagination even as they helped shape it. He describes Plath's ambiguous relations with her mother and with the two literary forebears who took the mother's place -- Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. And he examines Plath's doubling relationship to her husband, describing how she eventually transferred her doubling impulse to her texts. Axelrod concludes by suggesting a link between Plath's discontinuous narrative of the double and her personal fate.

Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words offers illuminating and often revolutionary readings of all of Plath's major texts, including such poems as "Daddy" and "Three Women, " her novel, The Bell Jar, and her letters and journals. At once sympathetic and incisive, it offers a compelling account of Plath's creative drive and personal history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Steven Gould Axelrod's new book should be considered the definitive study of Plath... [It] enlarges our view of Plath's work and provides important new interpretations of poems we might have imagined we knew well. This book is essential reading for all critics of Plath's work.

(Margaret Dickie Journal of English and Germanic Philology )

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (March 1, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080184374X
• ISBN-13: 978-0801843747
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #815,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I write about poetry and the poetic imagination in the United States. I also teach poetry as a Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

In my writing and teaching, I try to bring poetry alive. I hope to restore it to a central place in U. S. culture. I hope to foster in my readers and students a love of the text and a fascination with the poem as an intellectual and emotional complex as well as a sensuous structure--something felt in the blood and along the heart, something that can shake up your world.

My first book, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978), charted Lowell's career as a poet who continuously remade himself and who identified himself completely with his words. I returned to Lowell in such edited books as Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry (1986) and The Critical Response to Robert Lowell (1999).

Another of my books, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990), was a biography of Plath's imagination. It traced the poet's conflicts with her father and with male poetic traditions; her complicated sense of herself as her mother's daughter and as a woman poet; and her divided sense of self and her ambivalent emotions toward her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. The book provides close readings of Plath's poetry, fiction, and life from feminist, biographical, intertextual, and theoretical perspectives.

A third project as been The New Anthology of American Poetry, co-edited with Camille Roman of Washington State University and Thomas Travisano of Hartwick College. This three-volume teaching anthology provides copious commentary on each poet and poem, amounting to a literary history as well as a collection of poems.

Volume 1 (2003) moves from the beginnings to 1900, including such admired poets as Anne Bradstreet, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as lesser-known poets and poems by Native Americans, African American slaves, and Latina/o and Asian immigrants.

Volume 2 (2005) continues the story from 1900 to 1950, focusing on such poets as Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H. D., Marianne Moore, Angelina Weld Grimke, Charles Reznikoff, Hart Crane and Langston Hughes as well as many lesser-known poets and such cultural materials as popular song lyrics and immigrant poems.

Volume 3 (forthcoming) will carry the story up to the present moment, including writers ranging from Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks through Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath to Bob Dylan and Rae Armantrout.

I've spent my life in poetry, moved and mystified by the forms words can take and the way those forms can make the reader or reciter more self-aware and more aware of others. I invite you to join the intense conversation I have been having about poetry in my books.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you need to know, March 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (Paperback)

This book is a terrific combination of Axelrod's interpretations and Plath's life. It does not rest only upon facts, but instead it does a beautiful job of twisting together her life, her writing and her psychological condition. If you love Plath and her writing, this is the book for you. It is intelligent and written for people who not only want to know more about the life of a very troubled and talented woman, but those who also love her poetry.