Preview

Conflicting Perspectives: Ted Hughes' Anthology of Birthday Letters

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
3980 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Conflicting Perspectives: Ted Hughes' Anthology of Birthday Letters
CONFLICTING PERSPECTIVES
Conflicting perspectives arise due to subjective human experiences, resulting in alternative perceptions of situations, events and personalities. In Ted Hughes’ anthology of “Birthday
Letters”, poetry is utilised as an emotive medium to express the ephemeral nature of perspectives by reflecting on his turbulent relationship with Sylvia Plath concurrently

Comment [MM1]: ? Are you sure you want to say perspectives are ephemeral?
You do know that means temporary, or short‐lived right?

revealing how composers can manipulate the preconceived ideas of responders to protect public identity. Ted Hughes’ utilises the poetic form and his reflection on his turbulent relationship with Sylvia Plath as a means to express the X nature of conflicting perspectives, ultimately revealing how composers can manipulate the preconceived ideas of responders to protect their public identity. (Hughes’ poem “Full BrightFulbright Scholars” discusses how memories are subjective, and may change with time, whilst “Red” is positioned to question the conflict regarding Plath’s personality.) Alternatively, both Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men and Sarah Curchwell’s essay Secret and Lies explore how perspectives are coloured by

Comment [MM2]: Or perhaps just
‘revealing the role of personal agenda in manipulating public perception’
Comment [MM3]: Too long, too wordy, too many ideas in the one sentence. Also, poetry is the textual form, not the medium they refer to in the rubric – if you’re referring to medium in another sense of the word, find another way to express it
Comment [MM4]: Er, I wouldn’t really introduce these in the introduction – preferably leave until the body

interpretation and personal biases. These varying perspectives are necessary for audiences to better discern the truth from through an understanding of why conflicting perspectives occur.

The interplay between memory and hindsight rarely tessellate with

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    Perhaps the first thought to mind when the name Sylvia Plath is mentioned is pure ironic tragedy. What a destructive death for a woman with a seemingly jubilant life. It is know to most that she was a poet and author beyond her time, beaming with creativity and writing poetry in her early teen years. However, with longing for fame struck the bittersweet reality of holding the title for the most unfortunate life. How can it be, that a woman struck by dire occurrences, leave such an incredible mark in the guest book of all great authors and poets? It seems to be true that many a melancholy poet, tend to be of the male gender; at least those who are greatly remembered and studied. So why is Plath one…

    • 1435 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sylvia Plath

    • 1525 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Sylvia Plath poetry is unique because of her use of language and the perspective and themes she explores, creating powerful images and original metaphorical ideas to evoke a strong climax of feelings which express the struggles she experienced in her own personal life. Her poems ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’ are confessional poems that use contemporary form and respectively a childlike and mocking tone to convey the persona’s mixed sense of emotions . Plath’s poetry utilises unique language to express her anger, hope, desire and disappointment. There is a constant suicidal motif in her poems revealing her personal issues and problems which are linked to male domination in the patriarchal society she resided in. It is unusual that Plath’s poetry is written in a strong female perspective contrary to the passive domesticity which women were meant to abide by in her 1950’s and 1960’s context.…

    • 1525 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sylvia Plath is an American writer whose well-known poems are carefully written pieces distinguished for their personal imagery and intense dialogue. Written in 1960, "Point Shirley" is a poem in which the details are more important than the actual time and place that the events occurred.…

    • 658 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were both great minds, creative individuals, and some of the greatest poetic individuals of the twentieth century. Though Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were great poets, they were also obsessed with death, darkness, and plagued with manic depression. They yearned for death, and both were able to achieve their life goal of dying. They're poetry is a direct result of their morbid minds and the strange obsessions they shared during they're several years of friendship.…

    • 1563 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    When speaking about Sylvia Plath a word too often use is Tragedy, the tragedy that was her life and the pain that ended it. Plath is known for her cynical twisted writing, but never too far from the truthful pain no one dared to speak about. Plath was far more than just a sad woman who made it an art form. Plath was more than other women on the Ted Hughes list of accomplishments, she was a literary genius and was a face of a movement that 50 years later is still worthy of praise. Sylvia Plath should be known for not only her literary accomplishments but the voice she created for women too not only speak about the unspeakable but to be open about the serious nature of mental illness. Sylvia Plath’s suicide is said to have overshadowed…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Module C Response

    • 901 Words
    • 4 Pages

    To begin, in Ted Hughes’s 1999 poem collection Birthday Letters focuses on the pitfalls of the relationship while offering insight into the conflict’s origin. In Hughes’s poem “The Shot”, he identifies Plath’s obsession with her father’s death as the source of her distress through the use of an extended metaphor, use of imagery and visual structure. He begins by comparing Sylvia’s father to a “God” and her obsession as her “worship” to him as he describes, “Your worship needed a god. Where it lacked one, it found one here”. The religious reference communicates to us the audience the severity of her devotion and also her need to fulfil it with other male figures. Hughes continues to compare Plath’s consequent actions through an extended metaphor of a “bullet”. He describes her “You were gold-jacketed, solid silver, nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect. ” The detail within the imagery such as “gold”, ”silver” and “nickel” establishes Plath’s high maintenance and her determination through the short syntax of “trajectory perfect”. Therefore, we , the audience is presented with one of the perspectives which establishes the sources of conflict in the relationship.…

    • 901 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sylvia Plath, an extremely influential and beloved female poet who lived in the mid-20th century, was the author of numerous poems as well as the semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Her work, especially that of her adult life, heavily reflects the darkness and depression that she dealt with. Plath, born in October of 1932, began writing at a very young age. Her first published work, titled simply “Poem”, was published before she had even turned ten. Plath wrote many short stories during her early years, and she even won several writing competitions. One of these was a fiction contest that earned her a position as guest editor at Mademoiselle…

    • 1079 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sylvia Plath, who is highly regarded as an acclaimed American poet and story writer, was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath on October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath experienced a great deal of sorrow during her childhood because of her father’s death. Sylvia Plath expresses her ambivalent feelings and complex ideas about her father in her poems. Therefore, the poems reflected Sylvia Plath’s life. Lady Lazarus is Sylvia Plath’s one of her autobiography poems which stems from the author’s mind. The poem is written before her last attempting suicide, which she actually succeeded. The reader can use one’s imagination by reading her images and feelings in her confessional poem. In the poem, she reflected her hardship that she inevitably…

    • 1290 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Conflicting Perspectives

    • 2068 Words
    • 9 Pages

    The notion of truth being a defined reasoning and represented as a one sided argument is unmistakably how most audiences visualize it. The concept cannot be interpreted in such close mindedness, as to tell the truth is to speak what appears “truthful” to “you”. Conflicting perspectives arise when the visualization of how feasible or veracious something is differs between individuals. The controversy surrounding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, contentious poets of the twenty first century portray their own reality through their semi-confessional poetry. Sylvia Plath frequently extends her cereal obsession with her dead father as well as committing a certain bias declaration about past events to her poetry. If an audience were to read just Plath’s semi-autobiographical work the bell jar or even her late published work, Ariel they would quickly succumb to the confessional ‘finger pointing’ at Hughes and her father that she is notoriously regarded for. Hughes’ work, in contrast often speaks of the good times in their passionate relationship enticing less cynicism and promoting his protagonist-like character. Hughes’ “Fulbright Scholars”, for example has a much lighter tone with a series of guesses and faded recollection of enjoyable excitement confided in his first meeting with Plath. Condescending to Plath’s degenerative works like “the rabbit catcher” or “the jailer”, freckled with darkness and hatred. Without implication of Hughes’ goodness, he frequently took an objective stance in his work; “the minotaur” and “Sam” can both be interpreted as Hughes talking himself out of situation by exaggerating his veracity almost to a level of ‘whininess’. Reading about the two scholars, one would be lead to believe that they communicated to each other more through their poetry, expressing deeper emotions lyrically then they did conversely. The often strongly differing…

    • 2068 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘Whiteness I Remember’, and Ted Hughes’s poem, ‘Sam’, are two poems which describe an experience of Plath’s when she was a student at Cambridge. She was out on her first ride when the horse she had hired the normally-placid Sam, bolted. Although Ted Hughes’s is describing the experience he uses insinuations throughout the poem to let out his perception of his marriage with Sylvia Plath, hence infuriating, the conflict in perspective between the two poems. The ideas of ‘conflicting perspective’ suggest that the composers of the texts present an even-handed, unbiased attitude to the events, personalities or situations represented. Conflicting perspectives explore the subjective truth of the individual, which are shaped by the construction of a text by a biased composer. Each person’s version of the truth in events, personalities and situations differs, by viewing separate perspectives an understanding of the motives and purpose of the composer is formed.…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    According to Jane Schill a perspective is “a impression that is given by viewing something from a certain position.” Due to the inherent subjective bias of interpretation, conflicting perspectives surrounding Hughes and Plath’s controversial relationship are inevitable. This duality of viewpoint is seen in “Fulbright Scholars” and “Sam” by Ted Hughes and of the poem “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath, where both poets manipulate language, sound and textual form to attest to the veracity of their own personal perspectives while providing deeper personal insights of one another.…

    • 1293 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Sow

    • 372 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Sylvia Plath was able to show the different thoughts the narrator has of his neighbors pig. She is able to show us how the narrator thinks that this pig is this magnificent creature even though it’s not. Through diction, comparisons, and allusions Sylvia Plath is able to show us what the narrator is seeing…

    • 372 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The purpose of this essay is that history is a result of point of view.…

    • 778 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Saying Sylvia Plath was a troubled woman would be an understatement. She was a dark poet, who attempted suicide many times, was hospitalized in a mental institution, was divorced with two children, and wrote confessional poems about fetuses, reflection, duality, and a female perspective on life. Putting her head in an oven and suffocating was probably the happiest moment in her life, considering she had wanted to die since her early twenties. However, one thing that was somewhat consistent throughout her depressing poetry would be the theme of the female perspective. The poems selected for analysis and comparison are, ”A Life”(1960),”You’re”(1960), “Mirror” (1961), “The Courage of Shutting-Up” (1962) and finally, “Kindness” (1963). All five of these previously discussed poems have some sort of female perspective associated with them, and that commonality is the focus point of this essay.…

    • 1835 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Anne Sexton

    • 1647 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Sylvia Plath’s troubled life began on October 27, 1932 when she was born to Otto and Aurelia Plath in Boston, Massachusetts (Mondragon). Plath developed a talent for literature from a very young age, and published her first poem at eight years old. Also at age eight, Plath suffered the traumatic loss of her father (Mondragon). He died on the night of November 5, 1940, and when Plath learned of her father’s death she announced, “I’ll never speak to God again” (Mondragon). Her strong feelings of anger, grief, and love from the loss of her father would shadow Plath for the rest of her life and appear in poems such as the famed “Daddy” (Mondragon). Plath continued to write throughout her school years and was featured in several magazine articles. However, Plath received numerous publication rejections throughout her life which caused her own belief in her talent to waver and gave her the feeling of being a failure. Plath also fell into a pattern where severe stress would cause physical ailments, which then led to cycles of depression and further stress…

    • 1647 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays

Related Topics