1. Select a poet. Your poet may be living or not.

2. Study at least three poems by your author (unless an exceptionally long poem is chosen--see me). Add your own observations and responses to each poem. Why did you choose it? What does it mean to you? Write and answer your own three study questions for each poem. Reproduce your poems before answering these questions. The poems do not need to have been originally written in English.

3. Author autobiography. From the point of view of the poet, write a letter to the class telling us what you feel we should know about you to better understand you and your work. Since you may have been dead awhile or may be somewhat senile, you will need to consult at least three different sources of information for an up-date on your achievements. These sources will be listed alphabeticalour achievements. These sources will be listed alphabetically by author's last name under WORKS CITED at the end of your letter. See sample letter.

Dear English 122 students:

I hope you appreciate my return from the comforts of death. This letter is an inconvenience, even to one blesses with strong psychic gifts. Believe me! There were times I wished I didn't have them.

Remember "there is a charge/For the eying of my scars." You wonder why I wrote of death and Jews in concentration camps. Personal experience is not a shut box. Pain is not anonymous. Dachau may as well have happened to me. Human to human, we make dignity impossible.

How did I write and why? The poems began like mosaics: slowly emerging a piece at a time. My Thesaurus was always open, marked in rings of dark ink. When my first child was born in 1960, my writing also came to life, and the poems came rapidly and easily. The Thesaurus stayed on the shelf.

You probably know me best for my novel, The Bell Jar, published a month before my death. And why did I write of death? Why the fascination? My father dies when I was eight. I never got over that. Maybe my psychiatrist could tell you why, but he's a professional and won't. Read my Journals if you really want to understand--unless Ted has destroyed them. I'll bet her had, at least the recent ones.

Maybe I was just too smart. Precocious was the work when I was small. All the college honors came too. But I saw too much and reacted too sensitively, and it killed me. I courted death more than once. Perhaps my self-destructiveness fed my creative energy. Some critics told me that.

You know that I married Ted Hughes. We both taught at Smith, and all was love and joy and children and poetry...for awhile anyway. We separated six years later. What a talent he had. Perhaps some day they'll make him Poetry Laureate of England. Better hide your raunchy poems if they do, Ted!

That's is all the sharing I care to do. I hope that you survive this class.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

WORKS CITED

Contemporary Literature--Permanent Series, A Bio-bibliographical Guide to Current Authors and Their Works. Ed. Christine Nasso. Detroit 1978: 416-418.

Humanities Index. April 1984-March 1985. Plath, S. "The Journals of Sylvia Plath." ed. L. W. Wagner "The Journals of Sylvia Plath." Contemporary Literature 24: 521-3. Winter 1983.

Literary and Library Prizes. Ed. Weber and Calvert. New York: 1980.

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