PrisonerOfPrey

I've been writing for awhile now but tried to stay away from the influences of other poets. Not to mention the ones that I'd been exposed to I didn't like much. I just decided that I should study published poets and I found a woman named Sylvia Plath. She is amazing, but I'd never heard of her before. What does everyone else think about her? Are there any other poets similar that I should look up?

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Now I lay me down to sleep/
With every passing thought I weep/
Lead me into nights dark bliss/
And let me wake in innocence. -Me

Malone

She's great, and quite famous. I'm in the minority that I like her prose better though. Read The Bell Jar.

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PrisonerOfPrey

I'll look it up. I've only just started on her completed works. Maybe up to 43 poems so far. My favorites that I've read are soliloquy of the solipsist and Dialogue between ghost and priest. I've noticed she uses the words green and blood a lot.

__________________
Now I lay me down to sleep/
With every passing thought I weep/
Lead me into nights dark bliss/
And let me wake in innocence. -Me

BOURBON

P of P... Plath is amazing. I strongly recommend you try to get hold of a recording of her reading her later poems. Reading her 'Letters Home' is also a wonderful experience. If you haven't read him yet, TS Eliot is a must read, as are Emily Bronte, John Lennon, Noel Gallagher and WB Yeats.

mandax

She has one novel, The Bell Jar, which I just recently read and liked very much. It's pretty depressing, but still worth reading. So don't read it if you're already depressed. It won't help very much. =P I love her writing style ... though she does seem to have an obsession with similies.

PrisonerOfPrey

Ah, a little extra depression can't hurt- especially if it's well written! I'm trying to get it from the library...yarg! Oh, yes Bourbon i'll check those other poets out. thank you.

__________________
Now I lay me down to sleep/
With every passing thought I weep/
Lead me into nights dark bliss/
And let me wake in innocence. -Me

ash somers

i'm not quite sure i understand
why you would stay away from
the influence of other poets > ?

*looks of confusion*

as far as i'm concerned there is absolutely nothing wrong
with being influenced by other poets, in fact, i would encourage such
sylvia plath is as good as any place to start and do read her 'daddy' poem
it's incredibly amazing, the power that women packs into a few lines, phenomenal

Mike C

All poets are influenced by other poets.

I loved the Bell Jar and she was certainly a fine poet, but I have a beef with her because she made it ok for generations of miserable teenagers to whine about how depressed they are.

Further reading; her ex-husband, Ted Hughes. He was probably her biggest influence, and he's arguably a better poet.

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Tiamat10

I have to second the Ted Hughes thing. When I studied Plath and Hughes in college, I didn't much care for the selected poems of hers that I was supposed to read, but then I found one in the stack that was amazing. Later research revealed that it was one of Hughes' poems, not Plath's. Not to say that some of her poems aren't nice, but I just didn't care for most of them.

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“Lee Pennington has been published in more than 300 magazines—and rejected so many thousand times that in one six-month period he papered all four walls of a room with rejection slips.”

--Andre Bernard, Bill Henderson, Rotten Rejections