Tag: Ted Hughes

Five Reasons Why We Need Poetry in Schools | Edutopia

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
    The earth, and every common sight,
            To me did seem
    Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.          5
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
        Turn wheresoe’er I may,
            By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

William  Wordsworth wrote the  poem above

Five Reasons Why We Need Poetry in Schools | Edutopia.

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The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written i...
The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written in alliterative verse and paragraphs, not in lines or stanzas. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I believe it’s very good to learn poetry by heart;I was lucky to study modern poetry in school.Poetry can express feelings and knowledge that ordinary language cannot.

I found out after writing some poetry myself that it made reading poetry much easier.So I recommend writing poetry even if it’s terrible because you learn so much and it opens a door into a new world

I love the Ode by Wordsworth.I never tried to learn it.It learned me!

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Plath’s therapist was not actually trained as a pyschoanalyst

http://www.salon.com/2004/11/29/plath_therapist/

I know that psychoanalysts are not meant to tell patients what to do.So I was surprised this one did.. like telling her to get a divorce.Now I discover she had not even undergone her own analysis.

Make sure your therapist  is trained if you need one

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THE CAMBRIDGE INTRODUCTION TO SYLVIA PLATH

 There has more been written,probably, about Sylvia Plath than any other poet of the last century.Much of it is  various  attempts at her  biography.The focus was on her actual life and its events.I  had only read “Daddy” and “lady Lazarus” but lately I read more from her collected works and I am now impressed with her poetic gift and her hard work developing it.Perhaps she worked too hard.Who can say?
So I was ready to read some critical evaluation of her writing.This book is excellent if a little short. I found it quite easy to read even though I have no academic training in literature.

There is a summary of her life but the main focus is on each  phase of her writing For someone of  only 30  when she  died she underwent remarkable transitions and growth of her poetic mind.I am also now re ading her prose which I had dismissed.

I recommend this wholeheartedly.There is another volume “The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath”

Here is a poem I like especially the last verse

Nick and the Candlestick

By Sylvia Plath

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs
Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,
Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! they are panes of ice,
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs—
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
 
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