Abstract for 2008 Honors Colloquium
Nathaniel Amos
English
"The Blood Jet of Poetry: Muse myths and the poetics of violence in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes"
Drawing on Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" and a mutual fascination with violence, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, one of the 20th-century's literary power marriages, developed a common text; a unified work that emerges from two seemingly disconnected collections. my project argues that Plath's Ariel and Hughes' Crow connect with each other in a way that develops such a text that, a seemingly impossible task because both were published after Plath's death in 1963. I explore constructions of shared muses, sources of creative inspirations, and argue that shared muses develop a common source of inspiration and eventually common texts.
