INTERVIEWER: You have been associated with Mark Strand and W.S. Merwin. How do you see their work as compared to yours?

HUGHES: I know Merwin’s work pretty well. Mark Strand’s less well, though I look at it very closely wherever I find it. I’ve been close to Bill Merwin in the past. I got to know him in the late fifties through Jack Sweeney who was then running the Lamont Poetry Library at Harvard. They had a house in London, and when Sylvia and I got back there in late 1959 they helped us a lot, in practical and other ways. Dido Merwin found us our flat, then half furnished it, then cooked things for Sylvia in the run up to our daughter being born. That was the high point of my friendship with Bill. He was an important writer for me at that time. It was a crucial moment in his poetry - very big transformations were going on in there; it was coming out of its chrysalis. And I suppose because we were so close, living only a couple of hundred yards apart, his inner changes were part of the osmotic flow of feelings between us. Very important for me. That’s when I began to get out of my second collection! of poems and into my third - which became the book entitled Wodwo. He helped me out of my chrysalis, too. Part way out. And he was pretty important for Sylvia a little later, when the Ariel poems began to arrive in early 1962. One of the hidden supply lines behind Ariel was the set of Neruda translations that Bill did for the BBC at that time. I still have her copy. It wasn’t just Neruda that helped her. It was the way she saw how Bill used Neruda. That wasn’t her only supply line, but it was one. I think Bill’s traveled further on his road than any contemporary U.S. or British writer I can think of. Amazing resources and skills.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think of the label “confessional poetry” and the tendency for more and more poets to work in that mode?

HUGHES: Goethe called his work one big confession, didn’t he? Looking at his work in the broadest sense, you could say the same of Shakespeare: a total self-examination and self-accusation, a total confession - very naked, I think, when you look into it. Maybe it’s the same with any writing that has real poetic life. Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic - makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can’t we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe, if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem - don’t even have a story. Don’t have a writer. If most poetry doesn’t seem to be in any sense confessional, it’s because the strategy of concealment, of obliquity, can be so compulsive that it’s almost entirely successful. The smuggling analogy is loaded with interesting cargo that seems to be there for its own sake - subject matter of general interest - but at the bottom of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, for instance, Milton tells us what nearly got him executed. The novelty of some of Robert Lowell’s most affecting pieces in Life Studies, some of Anne Sexton’s poems and some of Sylvia’s, was the way they tried to throw off that luggage, the deliberate way they stripped off the veiling analogies. Sylvia went furthest in the sense that her secret was most dangerous to her. She desperately needed to reveal it. You can’t overestimate her compulsion to write like that. She had to write those things - even against her most vital interests. She died befor e she knew what The Bell Jar and the Ariel poems were going to do to her life, but she had to get them out. She had to tell everybody * like those Native American groups who periodically told everything that was wrong and painful in their lives in the presence of the whole tribe. It was no good doing it in secret; it had to be done in front of everybody else. Maybe that’s why poets go to such lengths to get their poems published. It’s no good whispering them to a priest or a confessional. And it’s not for fame, because they go on doing it after they’ve learned what fame amounts to. No, until the revelation’s actually published, the poet feels no release. In all that, Sylvia was an extreme case, I think.

INTERVIEWER: Could you talk a bit more about Sylvia?

HUGHES: Sylvia and I met because she was curious about my group of friends at university and I was curious about her. I was working in London but I used to go back up to Cambridge at weekends. Half a dozen or so of us made a poetic gang. Our main cooperative activity was drinking in the Anchor and our main common interest, apart from fellow feeling and mutual attraction, was Irish, Scottish and Welsh traditional songs - folk songs and broadsheet ballads. We sang a lot. Recorded folk song was rare in those days. Our poetic interests were more mutually understood than talked about. But we did print a broadsheet of literary comment. In one issue, one of our group, our Welshman, Dan Huws, demolished a poem that Sylvia had published, “Caryatids.” He later became a close friend of hers, wrote a beautiful elegy when she died. That attack attracted her attention. Also, she had met one of our group, Lucas Myers, an American, who was an especially close friend of mine. Luke was very dark and skinny. He could be incredibly wild. Just what you hoped for from Tennessee. His poems were startling to us - Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens vocabulary, zany. He interested Sylvia. In her journals she records the occasional dream in which Luke appears unmistakably. When we published a magazine full of our own poems, the only issue of St. Botolph’s, and launched it at a big dance party, Sylvia came to see what the rest of us looked like. Up to that point I’d never set eyes on her. I’d heard plenty about her from an English girlfriend who shared supervisions with her. There she suddenly was, raving Luke’s verses at Luke and my verses at me.

Once I got to know her and read her poems, I saw straight off that she was a genius of some kind. Quite suddenly we were completely committed to each other and to each other’s writing. The year before, I had started writing again, after the years of the devastation of university. I’d just written what have become some of my more anthologized pieces - “The Thought Fox,” the Jaguar poems, “Wind.” I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search. To me, of course, she was not only herself: she was America and American literature in person. I don’t know what I was to her. Apart from the more monumental classics - Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and so on - my background reading was utterly different from hers. But our minds soon became two parts of one operation. We dreamed a lot of shared or complementary dreams. Our telepathy was intrusive. I don’t know whether our verse exchanged much, if we influenced one another that way - not in the early days. Maybe others see that differently. Our methods were not the same. Hers was to collect a heap of vivid objects and good words and make a pattern; the pattern would be projected from somewhere deep inside, from her very distinctly evolved myth. It appears distinctly evolved to a reader now - despite having been totally unconscious to her then. My method was to find a thread end and draw the rest out of a hidden tangle. Her method was more painterly, mine more narrative, perhaps. Throughout our time together we looked at each other’s verses at every stage - up to the Ariel poems of October 1962, which was when we separated.

INTERVIEWER: Do you know how Sylvia used her journals? Were they diaries, or notebooks for her poetry and fiction?

HUGHES: Well, I think Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker made a fair point about the journals: a lot of what’s in them is practice * shaping up for some possible novel, little chapters for novels. She was constantly sketching something that happened and working it into something she thought might fit into a novel. She thought of her journals as working notes for some ultimate novel, although, in fact, I don’t think any of it ever went into The Bell Jar. She changed certain things to make them work, to make some kind of symbolic statement of a feeling. She wasn’t writing an account of this or that event; she was trying to get to some other kind of ancient, i.e., childhood, material. Some of her short stories take the technique a stage further. Wanting to express that ancient feeling.

INTERVIEWER: What happened to Plath’s last novel that was never published?

HUGHES: Well, what I was aware of was a fragment of a novel about seventy pages. Her mother said she saw a whole novel, but I never knew about it. What I was aware of was sixty, seventy pages which disappeared. And to tell you the truth, I always assumed her mother took them all, on one of her visits.

INTERVIEWER: Would you talk about burning Plath’s journals?

HUGHES: What I actually destroyed was one journal which covered maybe two or three months, the last months. And it was just sad. I just didn’t want her children to see it, no. Particularly her last days.

INTERVIEWER: What about Ariel? Did you reorder the poems there?

HUGHES: Well, nobody in the U.S. wanted to publish the collection as she left it. The one publisher over there who was interested wanted to cut it to twenty poems. The fear seemed to be that the whole lot might provoke some sore of backlash - some revulsion. And at the time, you know, few magazine editors would publish the Ariel poems, few liked them. The qualities weren’t so obvious in those days. So right from the start there was a question over just how the book was to be presented. I wanted the book that would display the whole range and variety. I remember writing to the man who suggested cutting it to twenty - a longish intemperate letter, as I recall - and saying I felt that was simply impossible. I was torn between cutting some things out and putting some more things in. I was keen to get some of the last poems in. But the real problem was, as I’ve said, that the U.S. publishers I approached did not want Sylvia’s collection as it stood. Faber in England were happy to publish the book in any form. Finally, it was a compromise - I cut some things out and I put others in. As a result I have been mightily accused of disordering her intentions and even suppressing part of her work. But those charges have evolved twenty, thirty years after the event. They are based on simple ignorance of how it all happened. Within six years of that first publication all her late poems were published in collections - all that she’d put in her own Ariel, and those she’d kept out. It was her growing frame, of course, that made it possible to publish them. And years ago, for anybody who was curious, I published the contents and order of her own typescript - so if anybody wants to see what her Ariel was it’s quite easy. On the other hand, how final was her order? She was forever shuffling the poems in her typescripts - looking for different connections, better sequences. She knew there were always new possibilities, all fluid.

ORR: Sylvia, what started you writing poetry?

PLATH: I don’t know what started me, I just wrote it from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, I suppose, I’ve been a bit of a professional.

ORR: What sort of thing did you write about when you began?

PLATH: Nature, I think: birds, bees, spring, fall, all those subjects which are absolute gifts to the person who doesn’t have any interior experience to write about. I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

ORR: Now, jumping the years, can you say, are there any themes which particularly attract you as a poet, things that you feel you would like to write about?

PLATH: Perhaps this is an American thing: I’ve been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell’s poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Ann Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman4ike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting.

ORR: Now you, as a poet, and as a person who straddles the Atlantic, if I can put it that way, being an American yourself…

PLATH: That’s a rather awkward position, but I’ll accept it!

ORR: … on which side does your weight fall, if I can pursue the metaphor?

PLATH: Well, I think that as far as language goes I’m an American, I’m afraid, my accent is American, my way of talk is an American way of talk, I’m an old-fashioned American. That’s probably one of the reasons why I’m in England now and why I’ll always stay in England. I’m about fifty years behind as far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.

ORR: Does this mean that you think contemporary English poetry is behind the times compared with American?

PLATH: No, I think it is in a bit of a strait-jacket, if I may say so. There was an essay by Alvarez, the British critic: his arguments about the dangers of gentility in England are very pertinent, very true. I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

ORR: But don’t you think, too, that there is this business of English poets who are labouring under the whole weight of something which in block capitals is called ‘English Literature’?

PLATH: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I know when I was at Cambridge this appeared to me. Young women would come up to me and say ‘How do you dare to write, how do you dare to publish a poem, because of the criticism, the terrible criticism, that falls upon one if one does publish?’ And the criticism is not of the poem as poem. I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John Donne, and I first felt the full weight of English Literature on me at that point. I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I think that’ for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

ORR: You say, Sylvia, that you consider yourself an American, but when we listen to a poem like ‘Daddy’, which talks about Dachau and Auschwitz and Mein Kampf, I have the impression that this is the sort of poem that a real American could not have written, because it doesn’t mean so much, these names do not mean so much, on the other side of the Atlantic, do they?

PLATH: Well now, you are talking to me as a general American. In particular, my background is, may I say, German and Austrian. On one side I am a first generation American, on one side I’m second generation American, and so my concern with concentration camps and so on is uniquely intense. And then, again, I’m rather a political person as well, so I suppose that’s what part of it comes from.

ORR: And as a poet, do you have a great and keen sense of the historic?

PLATH:I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading more and more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I’m very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that as I age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn’t at all in my early twenties.

ORR: Do your poems tend now to come out of books rather than out of your own life?

PLATH: No, no : I would not say that at all. I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

ORR: And so, behind the primitive, emotional reaction there must be an intellectual discipline.

PLATH: I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they don’t ossify.

ORR: What about writers who have influenced you, who have meant a lot to you?

PLATH: There were very few. I find it hard to trace them really. When I was at College I was stunned and astounded by the moderns, by Dylan Thomas, by Yeats, by Auden even: at one point I was absolutely wild for Auden and everything I wrote was desperately Audenesque. Now I again begin to go backwards, I begin to look to Blake, for example. And then, of course, it is presumptuous to say that one is influenced by someone like Shakespeare: one reads Shakespeare, and that is that.

ORR: Sylvia, one notices in reading your poems and listening to your poems that there are two qualities which emerge very quickly and clearly; one is their lucidity (and I think these two qualities have something to do one with the other), their lucidity and the impact they make on reading. Now, do you consciously design your poems to be both lucid and to be effective when they are read aloud?

PLATH: This is something I didn’t do in my earlier poems. For example, my first book, The Colossus, I can’t read any of the poems aloud now. I didn’t write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me. These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I’ve got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my own writing development is quite a new thing with me, and whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud.

ORR: Do you think this is an essential ingredient of a good poem, that it should be able to be read aloud effectively?

PLATH: Well, I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I’m very excited by it. In a sense, there’s a return, isn’t there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

ORR: Or to sing to a group?

PLATH: To sing to a group of people, exactly.

ORR: Setting aside poetry for a moment, are there other things you would like to write, or that you have written?

PLATH: Well, I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry. Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you’ve got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you’ve just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! I’m a woman, I like my little Lares and Penates, I like trivia, and I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life, and so I’ve become very interested in novel writing as a result.

ORR: This is almost a Dr. Johnson sort of view, isn’t it? What was it he said, ‘There are some things that are fit for inclusion in poetry and others which are not’?

PLATH: Well, of course, as a poet I would say pouf! I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can’t put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can’t!

ORR: Do you find yourself much in the company of other writers, of poets?

PLATH: I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers. I think writers and artists are the most narcissistic people. I mustn’t say this, I like many of them, in fact a great many of my friends happen to be writers and artists. But I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. Well, she can’t understand anything I write. And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I’m fascinated by this mastery of the practical. As a poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who can teach me something practical.

ORR: Is there anything else you would rather have done than writing poetry? Because this is something, obviously, which takes up a great deal of one’s private life, if one’s going to succeed at it. Do you ever have any lingering regrets that you didn’t do something else?

PLATH: I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose. My best friends when I was young were always doctors. I used to dress up in a white gauze helmet and go round and see babies born and cadavers cut open. This fascinated me, but I could never bring myself to disciplining myself to the point where I could learn all the details that one has to learn to be a good doctor. This is the sort of opposition: somebody who deals directly with human experiences, is able to cure, to mend, to help, this sort of thing. I suppose if I have any nostalgias it’s this, but I console myself because I know so many doctors. And I may say, perhaps, I’m happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

ORR: But basically this thing, the writing of poetry, is something which has been a great satisfaction to you in your life, is it?

PLATH: Oh, satisfaction! I don’t think I could live without it. It’s like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I’m writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn’t the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.

from The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery. London: Routledge (1966). Online Source
pubblicata da Pamela J. Annas

La bibliografia dei libri che ho letto finora….BIBLIOGRAFIA

POESIA

• The Colossus & Other Poems, New York, Harper Perennial, 1981
• Ariel, Harper & Row, New York 1966
• Crossing the water , London, Faber&Faber, 1971; con il sottotitolo Trasitional Poems, New York, Harper&Row, 1972
• Winter Trees, New York, Harper&Row, 1972
• The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, ed Ted Hughes, New York, Harper&Row, 1981
• Selected Poems, London, Faber and Faber , 1985
• Poems, poesie scelte da Diane Wood Middlebrook con note di Ted Hughes, New York, Everymans Library ,1998
• Ariel: The Restored Edition, London, HarperCollins , 2004

PROSA

• Three Women , London, Turret Books, 1968; “Excerpt from a radio play Three Women” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.261-265.
• “Ocean 1212-W” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.266
• The Bell Jar, New York, Harper&Row, 1971
• Letters Home: Correspondence between 1950-1963, Aurelia Schober Plath, New York, Harper&Row, 1975; London, Faber and Faber , 1976
• The Bed Book, illustrato da Quentin Bell, London, Faber and Faber, 1976
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams :Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts, New York, Harper&Row, 1981
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes e Frances McCullogh, New York, Anchor Books,1982
• The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels, tesi di Plath allo Smith College, Rhiwargor, Powys, Embers Handpress, 1989.
• The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit ill. da Rotraut Susanne Berner, St Martins Press, 1996.
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed.Karen Kukil, London, Faber and Faber, 2000; New York, Anchor Books, 2000.
• Collected Children’s Stories, ill. di David Roberts, London, Faber Children’s Books, 2001.
• Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen, London, Faber and Faber, 2002.
• “America !America!” in Plath Sylvia, I capolavori di Sylvia Plath (con Aprefazione in italiano di Joyce Carol Oates e testo inglese a fronte), Cles, Mondadori, 2004.

PRINCIPALI CONTRIBUTI ITALIANI

• Billi Mirella, Il vortice fisso: la poesia di Sylvia Plath, Pisa, Pacini, 1983.
• Ghidini Francesca, Abitata da un grido. La poesia e l’arte di Sylvia Plath, Napoli, Liguori 2000
• Guido Maria Grazia, Sylvia Plath e la poetica della differenza. Una voce della “Waste Land” eliotiana, Galatina, Congedo, 1992.
• Pisapia Biancamaria, L’arte di Sylvia Plath, Roma, Bulzoni, 1974.
• Tesauro Alessandro, Sylvia Plath in immagini e parole , Salerno, Ripostes, 1996.
• Wagner Erica, Sylvia e Ted. Sylvia Plath,Ted Hughes e le Lettere di Compleanno, traduzione di Giorgia Sansi, Milano, La Tartaruga, 2004.

TRADUZIONI

• Plath Sylvia, Le muse inquietanti (The disquieting muses), traduzione di Amelia Rosselli e Gabriella Morisco, Milano, Mondadori, 1985 .
• Plath Sylvia, Max e il vestito color zafferano (The it doesn’t matter suit), traduzione e adattamento di Bianca Pitzorno, illustrazioni di Susanne Berner, Milano, Mondadori, 1997.
• Plath Sylvia, Ventisei poesie, collana “I miti poesia”, n. 59, Milano, Mondadori, 1998.
• Plath Sylvia, A letto bambini (The Bed Book), in appendice: testo orig. The bed book, traduzione di Bianca Pitzorno, illustrazioni di Quentin Blake, Milano, Mondadori, 1999.
• Plath Sylvia, Opere, a cura di Anna Ravano, con introduzione di Nadia Fusini “Sylvia perché la poesia?”, Milano, Mondadori , 2002.
• Plath Sylvia, Johnny Panic e la Bibbia dei Sogni (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams), traduzione di Maria Luisa Cesa Bianchi, introduzione di Claudio Gorlier, Milano, Mondadori, 1986.
• Plath Sylvia, I capolavori di Sylvia Plath, con prefazione in italiano di Joyce Carol Oates e testo inglese a fronte, Milano, Mondadori 2004.
• Plath Sylvia, I diari di Sylvia Plath (The Journals of Sylvia Plath), a cura di Ted Hughes e Frances McCullough, trad. di Simona Fefé, Milano, Adelphi 2004.
• Plath Sylvia, Poesie, traduzioni di Giovanni Giudici e Anna ARavano, prefazione di Elisabetta Rasy, Milano, Mondadori, 2004, Supplemento a: Corriere della sera.
• Plath Sylvia, La campana di vetro (The Bell Jar) trad. di Daria Menicanti, Milano, Mondadori, 1968; a cura di Adriana Bottini e Anna Ravano, Milano, Mondadori, 2005.
• Plath Sylvia, Lady Lazarus e le altre poesie, a cura di Giovanni Giudici, Milano, Mondadori,1976; rist. in “Oscar della Poesia del ‘900”, 1998; prefazione e traduzioni di Giovanni Giudici, un’analisi tecnica di John Frederick Nims, Introduzione ad Ariel, di Robert Lowell, testo inglese a fronte, Milano,Oscar Mondadori 2004.
• Plath Sylvia, Quanto lontano siamo giunti. Lettere alla madre (Letters Home: Correspondence between 1950-1963), a cura di Marta Fabiani, Guanda, Parma, 1979; Parma, Guanda, 2003.

BIOGRAFIE ITALIANE

• Caracci Stefania, I giorni del suicidio, Lancusi, Ripostes, 2001.
• Caracci Stefania, Sylvia. Il racconto della vita di Sylvia Plath, Roma, E/O, 2005.
• Stevenson Anne, Vita di Sylvia Plath (Bitter Fame. A Life of Sylvia Plath), traduzione di Rossella Bernascone, Milano, Mondadori, 1990.
• Kate Moses, L’inverno di Sylvia, Milano, Rizzoli, 2003.

SAGGI

• Alvarez Al, “Sylvia Plath” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.56-67.
• Brain Tracy, “Where are we” in The Other Sylvia Plath , New York, Longman, 2001, p.59-68.
• Brain Tracy, “Plath our compatriot” in The Other Sylvia Plath , New York, Longman, 2001, p.50-58.
• Brennan Claire, “Cultural and historical Readings” in The poetry of Sylvia Plath, ed.Claire Brennan, New York, Columbia University press, 1999.
• Campbell Wendy, “Remembering Sylvia” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.182-186.
• Charles Newman, “Candor is The Only Wile” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.21-55.
• Cleverdon Douglas, “On Three Women” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of SylviaA Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.227-229.
• Dyson A.E.,”On Sylvia Plath” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.204-210.
• Ellmann Mary, “The Bell jar – An American girlhood” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.221-226.
• Gorlier Claudio, prefazione in La campana di vetro, Cles, Mondadori, 2002.
• Howard Richard, “Sylvia Plath : I have No Face, I Have Wanted to Efface Myself” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.77-88.
• Hughes Ted, “Foreword” in Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes e Frances McCullogh, New York, Anchor Books,1982.
• Hughes Ted, “Introduction” in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, ed Ted Hughes, New York, Harper&Row, 1981,pp.13-17.
• Hughes Ted, “The Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.187-195.
• Lavers Annette, “The World As An Icon - On Sylvia Plath’s themes” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.100-135.
• Nims John Frederick, “The poetry of Sylvia Plath- A technical analysis “ in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.136-152.
• Oates Joyce Carol, The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poems of Sylvia Plath, in in Sylvia Plath, I capolavori di Sylvia Plath (testo inglese a fronte), Milano, Mondadori, 2004.
• Plath Aurelia, “prefazione” in Aurelia Schober Plath (ed.), Letters Home: Correspondence between 1950-1963, New York, Harper&Row, 1975.
• Rosenthal M.L ,“Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.69-76.
• Sexton Anne, ”The Barfly Ought To Sing”, in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath,A Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.174-181.
• Smith Edward-Lucie, “Sea-imagery in the Work of Sylvia Plath “ in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.91-99.
• Spender Stephen, “Warning From The Grave” Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.199-203.
• Steiner George, “Dying is An Art” in Charles Newman(ed.), The Art of Sylvia Plath, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970, p.211-218.
• Zaccaria Paola, A lettere scarlatte: poesia come stregoneria. Emily Dickinson, H(ilda) D(oolittle), Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robin Morgan, Adrienne Rich (e altre…), Milano, Franco Angeli, 1995.
• Nadia Fusini “Sylvia perché la poesia?”, in Sylvia Plath, Opere, Milano, Mondadori, 2002.

TESTI CRITICI

• Axelrod Gould Steven, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press,1990.
• Brennan Claire, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath , New York, Columbia University Press, 2001.
• Brain Tracy, The Other Sylvia Plath , New York, Longman, 2001.
• Britzolakis Christina, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, London, Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Butcher Edward (ed), Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, Dodd Mead, New York, 1977; Peter Owen, London, 1979.
• De Marco Nick, Costantini Mariaconcetta, Victorian Poetry, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy, Milano, Principato, 1999.
• Gill Jo, The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Kroll Judith, Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, New York, Harper &Row, 1976.
• Kendall Tim, Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, London, Faber & Faber, 2001.
• Newman Charles, The Art of Sylvia Plath, Ed.Charles Newman, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970.
• Peel Robin, Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics, Madison, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002 ; London , Associated University PressAes, 2002.
• Rose Jacqueline, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Tabor Stephen, Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography, London, Mansell, 1987.
• Van Dyne Susan R, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
• Wagner Erica, Ariel’s Gift, London, Faber&Faber, 2000.
• Wagner-Martin Linda, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

TESTI METODOLOGICI

• Eco Umberto, Come si fa una tesi di laurea, Milano, Bompiani, 1995.

OPERE DI RIFERIMENTO

• Abrams M.H., The Northon Anthology of English Literature, New York, Northon&Company, 1999, vol. secondo, sesta edizione.
• Zolla Elémire, I contemporanei, Letteratura Americana, Luciano Roma, Lucarini, 1982, vol. primo.

ARTICOLI

• Ghidini Francesca, “L’iniziazione mancata: elementi mitici nella poesia di Sylvia Plath”, in Merope (Anno IV, n°6, Giugno 1992)
• Mariani Andrea, “Ecfrasi e frammento d’ecfrasi nella poesia di Sylvia Plath” estratto in Letterature d’America, Roma, Bulzoni (anno XXIII, n.96, 2003.)

ALTRI TESTI CITATI (nella mia tesi ndr)

• Plath Sylvia,“Thalidomide” in Charles Newman,The Art of Sylvia Plath, Ed.Charles Newman, Bloomington&London, Indiana University Press, 1970.
• Arnold Mattew, “The Forsaken mermaid” in Matthew Arnold, The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems , London, B. Fellowes, 1849.
• Friedan Betty, The Feminine Mystique, Penguin Books, New York, 1963.
• John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art, Chicago,University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Hughes Ted, Birthday Letters, London, Faber & Faber, 1998, trad. It. Lettere di compleanno, a cura di Anna Ravano e con un saggio introduttivo di Nadia Fusini, Milano, Mondadori, 1999.
• Dickinson Emily, Poesie, con uno scritto di Natalia Ginzburg, testo originale a fronte, Cles, Mondadori, 1995.
• Eliot Thomas Sterne, La terra desolata Quattro quartetti, introduzione di Czeslaw Miloz traduzione e cura di Angelo Tonelli, testo originale a frAonte, Milano, Feltrinelli, 1995.
• Eliot Thomas Sterne, “Tradition and individual Talent”, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London, Methuen, 1920.
• Graves Robert, The White Goddess : A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, London, Faber & Faber, 1975. Traduzione italiana La Dea Bianca, Milano, Adelphi, 1992.
• Shakespeare William, The Tempest, Milano, Mondadori, 1991.RISORSE INTERNET
• Annas Pamela J., “The Self in the World: The Social Context of Sylvia Plath’s Late Poems” in Women Studies (vol 7, nos 1-2, 1980, pp 171-83.) cfr. Sylviaplath Homepage http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/annas.html, (visitato il 13/08/2007)
• Cretella Chiara “Ritratto della musa da giovane” cfr. Carmillaonline http://www.carmillaonline.com/archives/2007/03/002168.html#002168 (visitato il 27/09/2007).
• Drue Heinz, “An Interview with Ted Hughes from Paris Review”, The Art of Poetry No. 71, Paris Review, Issue 134, (Spring 1995) cfr. Sylvia Plath Homepage, http://www.sylviaplath.de/.
• plath/thint.html (visitato il 13/08/2007)
• Frazer sir James George, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition, London, Brick Court, Temple, 1922, cfr. The Online Books Page, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/.
• webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=3623 (visitato il 16/05/2006).
• Goethe Johann Wolfgang, “Spirit Song Over The Waters” vv. 1-7 cfr. Fullbooks, http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Poems-of-Goethe5.html ( consultato il 13/08/2007).
• Gerbig Andrea “Trapped in language: aspects of ambiguity and intertextuality in selected poetry and prose by Sylvia Plath - Critical Essay”. Style. Spring 2002. FindArticles.com. 03 Oct. 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_1_36/ai_89985877.
• Matteoni Francesca, “L’osso della Luna: morte e rinascita di Sylvia Plath”, Re:, in http://www.re-vista.org/archivioITAsaggi.htm (ultima visita il 10/07/2007).
• McConnell Frank, “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. book reviews”, Commonweal, (Nov 6, 1992 ) cfr.Findarticles,http://findarticles.com/p/Aarticles/mi_m1252/is_n19_v119/ai_12843677 (visitato il 13/08/2007).
• Orr Peter (ed.), The Poet Speaks - Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966; New York, Barnes & Noble, 1966; cfr. University of Illinois, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htm( ultima visita il 13/08/2007).
• Nixon Richard e Khruschev Nikita, “Kitchen Debate” trascrizione cfr.Teachingamericanhistory,http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=176 (Visitato il 05/05/2007).
• Teicher Craig Morgan, “’All My Poems Are Love Poems’: When Two Poets Fall In Love”, 2007 cfr. Academy of American Poets http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19458 (visitato il 13/08/2007).