Reviews

Ariel's Gift: a commentary on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes by Erica Wagner

hearthwindsing's review against another edition

emotional informative inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

3.75

om_nom_nomigon's review against another edition

informative mysterious sad slow-paced

3.0

chawkinsknell's review against another edition

4.0

I loved the way the author integrated biography and poetry. Can't help but feel close to Plath, and also can't help but be freaked out by that.

hey_laura_mc's review against another edition

4.0

The best kind of literary criticism: gives the reader the background (and what context could be more notorious and suffocating than the Hughes/Plath mythology?) without relying wholly on it and still seeing the poetry as exactly that - that is, poetry. Well-researched, measured, thoughtful.

itsamess's review against another edition

4.0

"Quando sei l'unico scrittore creativo in famiglia, possono nascere gelosie e contrasti se gli altri non capiscono perché ti chiudi in una stanza solo con i tuoi pensieri, nel tentativo di corteggiare la musa. Quando si è in due, invece, c'è un'atmosfera di collaborazione. È più facile concentrarsi su cosa si fa, perché tutti e due si fa la stessa cosa. È come cantare insieme al buio."

Se il matrimonio fra Ted Hughes e Sylvia Plath è una canzone intonata al buio, le [b:Lettere di compleanno|13017313|Lettere di compleanno|Ted Hughes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1425482556l/13017313._SX50_.jpg|3051059] ne sono la partitura ed Erica Wagner è la simpatica vicina di casa che ti insegna a leggere la musica.

eta's review against another edition

informative reflective

4.0

merrybelletrist's review against another edition

5.0

I have become fascinated with this woman. It amazes me that if she were alive today she would be my grandma's age yet I like she's me. Idk I just feel connected to her. A bit too much I think.

balancinghistorybooks's review

4.0

Wagner's partial biography of Plath and Hughes, and commentary on Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, is both admirable and fascinating. Her commentary is well thought out, and whilst relatively slight for a book of this kind, there is a lot of depth to be found. Best read and savoured slowly, as there are a lot of ideas to chew over.

jeeleongkoh's review against another edition

4.0

In Ariel's Gift, Erica Wagner composes a running commentary on the poems in Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters. The commentary calls on Sylvia Plath's fiction, journals and letters, and on Hughes' few public statements after Plath's death, in order to shine a light on the poems. Wagner is particularly good, I think, on Hughes's sense of fate in the making of his and Plath's poems, and in the events that overtook them. Critics of Hughes may see the avowals of ignorance and helplessness in the Birthday Letters poems as evidence of blame-shifting and self-justification, but the poems themselves convey the ignorance and helplessness in a very palpable way. To enter the poems at all, one must enter them, suspending one's judgment. Wagner tries to be very fair-minded but it becomes clear in the course of her book that she is more sympathetic toward Hughes. The last chapter shows the pain that the living (Hughes and the children, Plath's mother Aurelia) have to bear when the dead is still capable of screaming from her grave.

Perhaps in response to the accusations of self-justification against Hughes, Wagner quotes Seamus Heaney's verdict on Plath's poetry. In his lecture "The Indefatigable Hoof-taps," Heaney explained what he saw as her limitation:

There is nothing poetically flawed about Plath's work. What may finally limit it is its dominant theme of self-discovery and self-definition, even though this concern must be understood as a valiantly unremitting campaign against the black hole of depression and suicide. I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry. But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained or least a fullness of self-possession denied to Sylvia Plath. . . . In "Lady Lazarus" . . . the cultural resonance of the original story is harnessed to a vehemently self-justifying purpose, so that the supra-personal dimensions of knowledge--to which myth typically gives access--are slighted in favor of the intense personal need of the poet.

If Birthday Letters is not a great book of poems because self-justification diminishes it, the same caveat must be applied to Plath's poetry.