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“... despite masses of publicity, these books tend to languish on the shelves. The commercial flop of Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Baby Hunger (published in the US as Creating a Life) was noted on the front page of the New York Times. But why the surprise? Only women buy this kind of book about women, and women know perfectly well that it’s hard to find love, that ...”

“... Book of Demons touches on the kinds of personal misery and breakdown that are also to be found in Sylvia Plath. The paranoid fantasies of the addict in forced recovery transform the hospital staff into ‘Stasi’ persecutors – ‘Mental rental idiots in hatred/uniform’, who thrust their hands down his throat and check his progress on ‘Himmler ...”

“... to the University of Michigan: ‘Keeping herself to herself, Madonna devoured the dark poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.’ An axe-murderer couldn’t carve up the girl more efficiently. But is it a case of diminished responsibility? One would like to think Andersen is of sound mind, that he writes with premeditation and intends the consequences ...”

“... Trying to cope and trying to write are not usually twins in the mind of the male writer. But for Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf they are the same. Smart’s great book, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, is a delirium of coping and writing, where there is not only a man to be loved and a duty to be borne but also dinners to prepare and beds ...”

“... Winnicott, they are mostly but not exclusively women: Rich, Woolf, but also Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. The book is a textual collage. It is through fierce verbal and textual contestation that the narrator’s struggle with her mother takes place: ‘Language was our field of contest.’ When Alison was 11, her mother ‘took over’ writing her ...”

“... on the vine.She comes to books by women later. Her university friend Dale won’t let her read Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton because they are too dangerous – though not for him.Women can’t withstand poetry, seemed to be Dale’s view. Women are beautiful and tender creatures and poetry breaks them, of course it does. Poetry rips right through ...”

“... poètes maudits, and they all died before Lowell. So did his pupils Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Dying at 60, Lowell, for all his self-destructive ways, was a survivor. Speaking of life in Boston during one of his spells there, Lowell tells Bishop that ‘in some groups we’ – he and his wife – ‘seem unspeakably strange and ...”

“... fellow Norwegian) to stare into the blank eyes (‘as if recently brainwashed’, as Sylvia Plath wrote) of the crowd on Karl Johansgatan. And then there are those other collectives that are deaf to the siren chant of the human. It is to them – ‘Sturgeon’, ‘Toad’, ‘Wild Horses’, ‘Pest ...”

“... and strange in Auden and nothing of Yeats and his gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Larkin, the ...”

“... Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Mary Lamb, Alice James, Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old charge’s head), or Augustine (Charcot’s ‘model patient’, whose much publicised poses taught a generation of ...”

“... an account of why her life mattered both in personal and aesthetic terms. Like Louise Bogan or Sylvia Plath, Stafford played the female masquerade to the hilt, from anorexia, alcohol, drugs, shrinks, suicide attempts and hospitals, to stories full of murderous anger submitted to astonishing verbal discipline. ‘I am trying so hard to be a ...”

“... my mouth. It is the terrain of (on the safer side) Kathleen Raine and (on the dangerous edge) of Sylvia Plath. But to stay there too long risks stasis or psychosis. And the archetypal identification may bring communion, not so much with self-transcending propulsions and patterns, as with monstrous self-projections that close the circle of the self more ...”

“... and gasp for air’, and recorded as building incinerators for the results of the process. If Sylvia Plath takes a liberty in making her ‘Daddy’ a Nazi genocide, Klima’s circumspect approach keeps the association only an echo, applies it to the narrator himself rather than another, and has the factual justification of his having himself nearly ...”

“... the kind of memory box ineradicably associated with Joseph Cornell: in this case, Ocean Library, Sylvia Plath ‘The Bell Jar’ (1991), which scatters the pages of Plath’s novel within the box’s interior; or how formally inventive we should consider Horn’s group of body fans, given the dazzling memory of ...”

“... lower and horizons diminished. There were, and still are, alternatives to Larkin. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison are powerfully present in these books, as are a number of the poets Motion and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek ...”