Creative

1. Creative ByMitch Hamburger, Kate Barlock, and Laura Eckman

2. Early Life • Born October 27, 1932 • Father died when she was eight • Went to Smith College on scholarship • Top of her high school and college class

3. Later life Married Ted Hughes and had two children Ted and Sylvia were separated Plath committed suicide shortly after Placed her head in a kitchen oven with the gas turned on Died of Carbon Monoxide poisoning at age thirty with her children sleeping in the other room

4. The Beast He won't be got rid of:Memblepaws, teary and sorry,Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's unfamiliar. A dustbin's enough for him.The dark's his bone.Call him any name, he'll come to it. Mud-sump, happy sty face.I've married a cupboard of rubbish.I bed in a fish puddle.Down here the sky is always falling.Hogwallow's at the window.The star bugs won't save me this mouth.I housekeep in Time's gut-end Among emmets and mollusks,Duchess of Nothing,Hairtusk's bride. He was the bullmanearliermKing of the dish, my lucky animal.Breathing was easy in his airy holding.The sun sat in his armpit.Nothing went moldy. The little invisiblesWaited on him hand and foot.The blue sisters sent me to another school.Monkey lived under the dunce cap.He kept blowing me kisses.I hardly knew him.

5. Common Literary Devices • Free Verse • Allusions • The Holocaust/World War II • Roman and Greek Mythology • Similes

6. Common Topics • Anger • Death • Destruction • Alienation

7. Fever 103° Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin. The tinder cries. The indelible smell Of a snuffed candle! Love, love, the low smokes roll From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel. Such yellow sullen smokes Make their own element. They will not rise, But trundle round the globe Choking the aged and the meek, The weak Hothouse baby in its crib, The ghastly orchid Hanging its hanging garden in the air, Devilish leopard! Radiation turned it white And killed it in an hour. Greasing the bodies of adulterers Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. The sin. The sin. Darling, all night I have been flickering, off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss. Three days. Three nights. Lemon water, chicken Water, water make me retch. I am too pure for you or anyone. Your body Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ---- My head a moon Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive. Does not my heat astound you. And my light. All by myself I am a huge camellia Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush. I think I am going up, I think I may rise ---- The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I Am a pure acetylene Virgin Attended by roses, By kisses, by cherubim, By whatever these pink things mean. Not you, nor him. Not him, nor him (My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ---- To Paradise.

8. Literary Criticism • “Unrestrained, exceedingly personal free verse, often about extreme emotional states” • “Sense of common humanity” • “intense focus” • “Inescapability of violence”

9. Agreements • Intensity • “Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through / Every woman adores a fascist / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you” • Extreme emotional aspects • “I was ten when they buried you. / At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do.” • Violence • “There’s a steak in your fat black heart / And the villagers never liked you. / They are dancing and stamping on you.”

10. Disagreements • Sense of humanity • “mature recognition that the essentials of one life are the essentials of all”