The Augustan Plath: "Gulliver" and Other Poems

Abstract

Abstract: Evidence suggests that Sylvia Plath encountered, paid attention to, and made use of eighteenth-century Augustan literature, but little scholarly attention has been paid to this territory of her reading. This article is primarily concerned with the complex (and at times reciprocal) relationship that exists between Plath's personal interest in Augustan literature and that literature's wider post-war critical reception. Looking at her annotated anthology of eighteenth-century verse (among other pieces of evidence), this article considers the ways in which Plath encountered and made sense of eighteenth-century Augustan literature, and then considers the extent to which that literature exerted a creative influence on Plath's own poetry. At the center of this discussion is "Gulliver," a direct response to Swift that, like so many of Plath's mock-heroic poems, is rarely examined either in itself or in relation to the mature poetry of Ariel .