The Power of Suicide: Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetic Responses to Sylvia Plath
Posted on December 15, 2016 by Arica Frisbey When it comes to Sylvia Plath and her death, the creative response from fellow poets is so very different. Ted Hughes, her estranged husband, wrote an entire book of poems in regards to her (Birthday Letters). Meanwhile, her friend/rival, Anne Sexton, composed a two paged elegy in her honor (“Sylvia's Death”). Then there is Muriel Rukeyser, a female poet who does not make an appearance in Plath's journals (though Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, who associated with and praised Rukeyser, did make it in), who wrote six lines between two poems, in concerns [...]