poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

i absolutely love this poem. does anybody know who she's talking to? is it anne sexton? i've always just assumed that but it's probably not right, and i think it would clear up a lot of questions about Lesbos.

sylvia is a goddess..this is an amazing lament of broken dreams conformity and entrapment..you feel her imprisonment and her wings fluttering against cages she has constructed for herself but is powerless to breakdown..i love this poem..especially the lines "i should sit on a rock off cornwall and comb my hair, i should wear tiger pants, i should have an affair"..the prospect of homosexual love aside even this poem is incredible. INCREDIBLE.

I read this poem in context with "The Rival", a similarly toned Plath poem. It's interesting that Sexton comes up, and I have long thought it referred to her, but ultimately, it's an amalgamation, I think, of Plath's view of women, generally--Sexton, her mother, her rivals for Hughes' attention.

It is, without doubt, my favorite poem in the English language. The images stick, the rage is so controlled, the tone is viciously consistent...one might believe that's easy to do, just by reading the poem. Go ahead, try it--this is virtuousity.

I believe that the poem "lesbos" by Sylvia Plath is actually about the time when Assia (a lady whom her and Ted had rented their London home to) came to visit them in Devon. Sylvia spent the entire weekend in the kitchen, hating every minute of her stay with them and ended up asking her to leave.

in the revised edition of ariels that was published with the original working order at the time of sylvia's death, her daughter writes in the forward... "My father left out some of the more lacerating poems. 'Lesbo's,' for instance, though published in the U.S. version of Ariel, was taken out of the British edition, as the couple so wickedly depicted in it lived in Cornwall and would have been much offended by its publication."