- •1828-1865: Romantic Period in America (1828-1865)
- •Washington Irving. Rip Van Winkle.
- •Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans.
- •Interracial relationships:
- •Nathaniel Hawthorne. Young Goodman Brown.
- •E. Allan Poe. The Raven. The Gold Bug.
- •1830-1840: Transcendentalism:
- •Important ideas
- •Ralph Waldo Emerson. Self-Reliance.
- •1865-1914: Realistic Period
- •Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- •O. Henry. Gift of the Magi. Squaring the Circle.
- •Theodore Dreiser. Sister Carrie.
- •1914 – 1939: Modern Period - Jazz Age
- •Ernest Hemingway. Hills Like White Elephants. A Farewell to Arms/The Old Man and the Sea.
- •William Faulkner. Delta Autumn/The Bear.
- •Poetry selection:
- •Lee Masters. Elsa Wertman. Hamilton Green.
- •E.A.Robinson. Luke Havergal.
- •Robert Frost. The Gift Outright.
- •Carl Sandburg. Grass.
- •E.E.Cummings. Pity This Busy Monster. Manunkind.
- •Langston Hughes. The Negro Speaks of Rivers.
- •Jerome David Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye.
- •Ray Bradbury. From “Martian Chronicles”/Farenheit 451.
- •James Baldwin. Sonny’s blues.
- •Poetry selection:
- •Theodore Roethke. Dolor.
- •Robinson Jeffers. Cassandra.
- •Inhumanism
- •Allen Ginsberg. America. Sunflower sutra.
- •Sylvia Plath. Tulips.
- •Louise Erdrich. Love Medicine.
Sylvia Plath. Tulips.
Sylvia Plath (1932 –1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
TULIPS: http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/tulips.html
Summary |
In this nine-stanza, sixty-three line poem, the speaker articulates her process of recovery from surgery in terms of the image of "excitable" tulips that interrupt her "winter" sojourn in the hospital where she has "given [her] name and [her] day-clothes up to the nurses / And [her] history to the anesthetist and [her] body to the surgeons." The images in the poem link one stanza to the other (the nurses like "gulls," her body "a pebble," her family "little smiling hooks," herself "a thirty-year-old cargo boat"). The image of the eye appears throughout the poem as well. The speaker is herself the pupil of a huge eye whose lids are the pillow and the sheet; in another stanza she finds herself existing between the "eye of the sun" and the "eyes of the tulips," herself without a face, but beginning to see beyond her own pain. The speaker has wanted only quiet and emptiness and is agitated by the presence of the tulips, whose "redness talks to [her] wound" and "weigh [her] down" as she is being "watched" and nearly suffocated ("The vivid tulips eat my oxygen") by them. The tulips, dangerous as "some great African cat," remind the speaker of her heart, a "bowl" that blooms red "out of sheer love of me," and realizes that the tulips call her, ultimately, back to "a country far away as health." |
Commentary |
Tulips is a fascinating look at the interplay between the desire for isolation and anonymity a hospital provides and the process of moving out of that isolation in the journey toward health. It also describes the totalizing qualities of pain and the necessary self-absorption that accompanies recovery. Plath's mention of the family as "hooks" is troubling and provides useful context for discussions about the family's role in a patient's healing. Finally, it is a beautifully crafted and complex poem that rewards several readings. |