Download or read book The Occult Sylvia Plath written by Julia Gordon-Bramer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Decodes the alchemical, Qabalistic, hermetic, spiritual, and Tarot-related references in many of Plath’s poems • Based on more than 15 years of research, including analysis of Plath’s unpublished personal writings from the Plath archives at Indiana University • Examines the influences of Plath’s parents, her early interests in Hermeticism, and her and husband Ted Hughes’s explorations in the supernatural and the occult Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling research—including analysis of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings, as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and family—Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plath’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963. She examines Plath’s early years growing up in a transcendentalist Unitarian church under a brilliant, if stern, Freemason father and a mother who wrote her master’s dissertation on the famous alchemist Paracelsus. She reveals Plath’s early knowledge of Hermeticism, how she devoured books on the occult throughout her life, and how, since adolescence, Plath regularly wrote of premonitory dreams. Examining Plath’s tumultuous marriage with poet Ted Hughes, she looks at their explorations in the supernatural and Hughes’s mentoring of Plath in meditation, crystal-gazing, astrology, Qabalah, Tarot, automatic writing, magical workings, and use of the Ouija board. She also reveals how, at the end of her marriage, Plath used her husband’s hair and fingernails in rituals. Looking at Plath’s writing and her evolution as a person through mystical, political, personal, and historical lenses, Gordon-Bramer shows how her poems take on radically new, surprising, and universal meanings—explaining why Hughes perpetually denied that Plath was “a confessional poet.” Contrasting the versions in Letters Home with those held in the Plath archives at Indiana University, the author also shows how all occult influences have been rigorously excised from the letters approved for publication by the Plath and Hughes Estate. Revealing significant, previously undiscovered meanings in Sylvia Plath’s works, much broader than the narrow lens of her tragic autobiography, the author shows how Plath’s writings are deeply rooted in her mystical and occult endeavors.
Download or read book Dialogue Over a Ouija Board written by Sylvia Plath and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fixed Stars Govern a Life The major arcana and the first 22 poems of Plath s Ariel written by Julia Gordon-Bramer and published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Fixed stars govern a life: decoding Sylvia Plath aligns Plath's great poetry collection, Ariel, with the tarot and Qabalah"--back cover.
Download or read book The Last Days of Sylvia Plath written by Carl Rollyson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written. Rollyson is the first biographer to gain access to the papers of Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse at Smith College, a key figure in the poet’s final days. Barnhouse was a therapist who may have been the only person to whom Plath believed she could reveal her whole self. Barnhouse went beyond the protocols of her profession, serving more as Plath’s ally, seeking a way out of the imprisoning charisma of Ted Hughes and friends he counted on to support a regime of antipathy against her. The Last Days of Sylvia Plath focuses on the train of events that plagued Plath’s last seven months when she tried to recover her own life in the midst of Hughes’s alternating threats and reassurances. In a siege-like atmosphere a tormented Plath continued to write, reach out to friends, and care for her two children. Why Barnhouse seemed, in Hughes’s malign view, his wife’s undoing, and how biographers, Hughes, and his cohort parsed the events that led to the poet’s death, form the charged and contentious story this book has to tell.
Download or read book Ariel written by Sylvia Plath and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ariel (1965) contains many of Sylvia Plath's best-known poems written in an extraordinary burst of creativity just before her death in 1963, including 'Lady Lazarus', 'Edge', 'Daddy' and 'Paralytic'. The first of four collections to be published by Faber & Faber, Ariel is the volume on which Sylvia Plath's reputation as one of the most original, daring and gifted poets of the twentieth century rests. This beautiful hardback reproduces the classic design of the first edition of a volume now recognised to be one of the most shocking and iconic collections of poetry of the twentieth century. 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the Observer
Download or read book Modernist Alchemy written by Timothy Materer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modernist Alchemy takes a close look at the work of twentieth-century poets whose use of the occult constitutes a recovery of discarded beliefs and modes of thought: Yeats and Plath try to dismiss conventional religion, Hughes captures a sense of adventure, H.D. seeks to liberate repressed concepts, while Duncan and Merrill hunt for a lost understanding of sexual identity which will allow for androgyny and homosexuality.
Download or read book Birthday Letters written by Ted Hughes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The past contemporary poet gives an account in 88 poems in letter form of hisromance and the life spent with Sylvia Plath.
Download or read book Where Did It All Go Right written by Al Alvarez and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-07-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Al Alvarez - poet, critic, novelist, sportsman, and poker player - has for seventy years been hard to categorize. He is the author of the best-selling study of suicide, THE SAVAGE GOD, and as poetry editor of the OBSERVER, he has known most of the leading poets of the second half of last century. For a time he was an influential critic and his anthology THE NEW POETRY scandalised the literary community. Much of the liveliness of Alvarez's story is inspired by the ambiguous fate of being an English Jew. Although his family had been settled in London for more than two centuries, being Jewish always made them feel like outsiders. From public schools to Oxford to the hardscrabble world of freelance writing, Alvarez found time to climb mountains, play poker and write books about these pastimes which are now regarded as classics. WHERE DID IT ALL GO RIGHT? is his memorable, irreverent account of that journey.
Download or read book Mad Girl s Love Song written by Andrew Wilson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On 25 February 1956, twenty-three-year-old Sylvia Plath walked into a party and immediately spotted Ted Hughes. This encounter - now one of the most famous in all literary history - was recorded by Plath in her journal, where she described Hughes as a 'big, dark, hunky boy'. Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow has obscured Plath's life and work. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship have dominated the cultural landscape to such an extent that their story has taken on the resonance of a modern myth. After Plath's suicide in February 1963, Hughes became Plath's literary executor, the guardian of her writings, and, in effect responsible for how she was perceived. But Hughes did not think much of Plath's prose writing, viewing it as a 'waste product' of her 'false self', and his determination to market her later poetry - poetry written after she had begun her relationship with him - as the crowning glory of her career, has meant that her other earlier work has been marginalised. Before she met Ted, Plath had lived a complex, creative and disturbing life. Her father had died when she was only eight, she had gone out with literally hundreds of men, had been unofficially engaged, had tried to commit suicide and had written over 200 poems. Mad Girl's Love Songwill trace through these early years the sources of her mental instabilities and will examine how a range of personal, economic and societal factors - the real disquieting muses - conspired against her. Drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers who have never spoken openly about Plath before and using previously unavailable archives and papers, this is the first book to focus on the early life of the twentieth century's most popular and enduring female poet. Mad Girl's Love Songreclaims Sylvia Plath from the tangle of emotions associated with her relationship with Ted Hughes and reveals the origins of her unsettled and unsettling voice, a voice that, fifty years after her death, still has the power to haunt and disturb.
Download or read book Decoding Sylvia Plath s Daddy written by Julia Gordon-Bramer and published by . This book was released on 2017-09 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not your average literary criticism, Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" talks you through complex information in a lively, conversational way. Revised and expanded from the Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath system (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is an affordable, concise, comprehensive analysis of Plath's poem "Daddy," written in a playful spirit that brings Plath out of the ashes of mere depressive autobiography and into the fascinating world of mysticism-in which Plath and her husband Ted Hughes had an intense interest. See what the academics have missed for over 50 years. Explore Plath's "Daddy" and how it perfectly aligns to reflect the "mirrors" of tarot and Qabalah, alchemy, mythology, history and the world, astrology and astronomy, and the arts and humanities. Gordon-Bramer surprises us with startling new insights and connections that, once seen, simply cannot be denied. She builds a strong case that we have yet to recognize Plath for her real genius and that Plath remains as relevant as ever. Back cover text: "Daddy" Not your average everyday Electra complex... "You do not do" Sylvia Plath studies without her bedazzling poem "Daddy." But do you get it? ...beyond the drama of anger and attraction from a daughter and wife? Fans: Discover the parallel themes of Sigmund Freud, King Brutus, the London Stone, and other exciting facts within "Daddy" that scholars have missed for over 50 years Poets & Writers: Judge for yourself how "Daddy" includes themes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and other literary works Students: Understand all themes and meanings beyond the superficial; learn why Plath used derogatory names and racism in "Daddy," and enlighten your classmates to her higher goals Teachers: Save time with a complete class plan, discussion questions and more Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" is the first of a series of Decoding books presenting Plath in compelling, original context, interpreted by the Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath system, by author Julia Gordon-Bramer. What readers are saying about Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Daddy" "I am fascinated and intrigued by Julia Gordon-Bramer's wildly and dizzyingly original readings of Sylvia Plath's poems. Not only does she make me realize that I need to go back and read the poems again, she comes pretty close to convincing me that I have really never read them at all." -Troy Jollimore, National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts Recipient "Julia Gordon-Bramer's Decoding Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' presents the iconic poet in full three-dimensional view. Or six-dimensional, if you prefer. This Sylvia Plath is far more than the depressive, suicidal drama queen and father-hater depicted in easier accounts of the poet's life. Plath emerges as the genius's genius. Ms. Bramer's tone adds enjoyment to her already rigorous and penetrating work." -Robert Nazarene, founding editor, The American Journal of Poetry "This is a friendly, conversational approach so that students won't feel overwhelmed, and it talks about topics that other guides don't, allowing students to make original, insightful commentary on the work. The study guide is a worthwhile, useful investment for students." -Cathleen Allyn Conway, editor, Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Plath Studies 101 pages Author Julia Gordon-Bramer is a cross between Gregg Braden, who brings spirituality to science, and Jen Sincero, who brings spirituality to being a "Badass." With personality, clarity, and wit, this author, poet, scholar, professor and professional tarot card reader has spent the last decade interpreting Sylvia Plath's
Download or read book Decoding Sylvia Plath s Lady Lazarus written by Julia Gordon-Bramer and published by Magi Press. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revised and expanded from the Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath system (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" is an affordable, concise, comprehensive analysis of Plath's poem "Lady Lazarus," written in a playful spirit that brings Plath out of the ashes of mere depressive autobiography and into the fascinating world of mysticism-in which Plath and her husband Ted Hughes had an intense interest. See what the academics have missed for over 50 years. Explore Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and how it perfectly aligns to reflect the "mirrors" of tarot and Qabalah, alchemy, mythology, history and the world, astrology and astronomy, and the arts and humanities. Gordon-Bramer surprises us with startling new insights and connections that, once seen, simply cannot be denied. She builds a strong case that we have yet to recognize Plath for her real genius and that Plath remains as relevant as ever. Back cover text: "Lady Lazarus" More than just a hot mess You get the sense already that Plath's "Lady Lazarus" is a fierce, angry, feminist poem. But do you know why? Can you explain it beyond your personal feeling or Plath's literal autobiography? Fans: Discover the parallel themes of the Statue of Liberty, the abolitionist, the feminist, and other exciting facts within "Lady Lazarus" that scholars have missed for over 50 years Poets & Writers: Judge for yourself how "Lady Lazarus" includes themes of Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus," Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?," and the Egyptian Book of the Dead's titles of Isis Students: Understand all themes and meanings beyond the superficial; learn why Plath used Jewish and Holocaust references in "Lady Lazarus," and enlighten your classmates to Plath's higher goals Teachers: Save time with a complete class plan, discussion questions and more Decoding Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" is the second in a series of Decoding books presenting Plath in compelling, original context, interpreted by the Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath system, by author Julia Gordon-Bramer. What readers are saying about the Decoding Sylvia Plath series: "I am fascinated and intrigued by Julia Gordon-Bramer's wildly and dizzyingly original readings of Sylvia Plath's poems. Not only does she make me realize that I need to go back and read the poems again, she comes pretty close to convincing me that I have really never read them at all." -Troy Jollimore, National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts Recipient "Julia Gordon-Bramer's Decoding Sylvia Plath series presents the iconic poet in full three-dimensional view. Or six-dimensional, if you prefer. This Sylvia Plath is far more than the depressive, suicidal drama queen and father-hater depicted in easier accounts of the poet's life. Plath emerges as the genius's genius. Ms. Bramer's tone adds enjoyment to her already rigorous and penetrating work." -Robert Nazarene, founding editor, The American Journal of Poetry "This is a friendly, conversational approach so that students won't feel overwhelmed, and it talks about topics that other guides don't, allowing students to make original, insightful commentary on the work. The study guide is a worthwhile, useful investment for students." -Cathleen Allyn Conway, editor, Plath Profiles: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Plath Studies # pages
Download or read book Sylvia Plath Drawings written by Sylvia Plath and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique and invaluable collection of the young Sylvia Plath’s drawings from important and formative years in her life: 1955-1957 Sylvia Plath: Drawings is a portfolio of pen-and-ink illustrations created during the transformative period spent at Cambridge University, when Plath met and secretly married poet Ted Hughes, and traveled with him to Paris and Spain on their honeymoon, years before she wrote her seminal work, The Bell Jar. Throughout her life, Sylvia Plath cited art as her deepest source of inspiration. This collection sheds light on these key years in her life, capturing her exquisite observations of the world around her. It includes Plath’s drawings from England, France, Spain, and New England, featuring such subjects as Parisian rooftops, trees, and churches, as well as a portrait Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath: Drawings includes letters and diary entries that add depth and context to the great poet’s work, as well as an illuminating introduction by her daughter, Frieda Hughes.
Download or read book The Haunted Reader and Sylvia Plath written by Gail Crowther and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative and unique study exploring why many readers of Sylvia Plath become so attached to her as a cultural figure. By looking at first encounters with Plath's work through to pilgrimages that they make to places where Plath lived, this study explores why readers become so haunted by Plath.
Download or read book Chapters in a Mythology written by Judith Kroll and published by History PressLtd. This book was released on 2007 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a study of Sylvia Plath. This work asserts the view that Plath's work comprised of an elaborate entire mythology and it is noticeable.
Download or read book Ted Hughes written by Jonathan Bate and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain’s most important poets. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children’s writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letterwriter since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. His lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, is the saddest and most infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Hughes left behind a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems, and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes’s inner life, which he preserved for posterity. Renowned scholar Jonathan Bate has spent five years in the Hughes archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book offers, for the first time, the full story of Hughes’s life as it was lived, remembered, and reshaped in his art.
Download or read book Spells written by Sarah Shin and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems take us into a place where the right words can influence the universe. Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry brings together 30 contemporary voices exploring the territory between the occult and the subversion of patriarchy. Occult poetics is a method of self-determination and transformation through a summoning of the world, through remaking reality. Capable of holding the contradictions of identity and trauma, poetry as magical language is talismanic, offering a sacred space away from everyday experiences of oppression. Spells honours the world of feeling, the world of the unconscious, the world of the body: desires and practices that are messy and diverse, as well as joyful, fun and celebratory. Contains new work by: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing & Jane Yeh.
Download or read book The Lost Papers of Sylvia Plath written by Grace Medlar and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lost Papers of Sylvia Plath follows the questionable literary escapades of undergraduate Sandra Kohl and her adviser Diane Richmond at a sleepy Midwestern campus in winter 1997-98. As the student struggles over metaphysical disturbances with her research around Sylvia Plath, the advisor draws on her youthful experience as a hippie visionary to bring the increasingly bothersome spooks in line. Egged on by Plathomaniac professor Jim Handler, the two women diagram the writer's mentors, family intrigues and critical hullabaloo in a multidimensional board game to entice a local collector into revealing some of Sylvia's famously missing manuscripts he covets. But things get out of hand for Diane. On a Full Hunters Moon night, a drug-soaked meeting with the collector becomes a contest of wits and mind games of the magical sort. And with the help of home-baked mysticism, word rage and goddess power, a new spin on the Ariel poems and the whole Plath enchilada emerges. Revised 2013.
