Sylvia Plath is widely recognized as one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century. When her Collected Poems was published it won the Pulitzer Prize. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, has become a modern classic. Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to readers. But, like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination...

Essays on the writers whose works are the story of modern American poetry to World War II - the story of successive generations of writers increasingly gaining familiarity in and security with the American idiom, gaining confidence in being American poets without having to turn to Europe for models or for approval, nor of having to turn away from Europe.

Essays on the writers whose works are the story of modern American poetry to World War II - the story of successive generations of writers increasingly gaining familiarity in and security with the American idiom, gaining confidence in being American poets without having to turn to Europe for models or for approval, nor of having to turn away from Europe.

An intense, refractory memoir by a major poet Misgivings is C. K. Williams's searing recollection of his family's extreme dynamics and of his parents' deaths after years of struggle, bitterness, and inner conflict. Like Kafka's self-revealing Letter to His Father, Misgivings is full of doubt, both philosophical and personal, but as a work of art it is sure and true. Williams's father was an "ordinary businessman"--angry, demanding, addicted to the...