ABSTRACT
Anne Stevenson's reputation as a poet has in recent years been somewhat overshadowed by the scandal and controversy ensuing on the publication of her biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter Fame. Stevenson's other prose writings, however, and in particular two essays on Plath and Romanticism that she published shortly after the biography's appearance. In the essay on Plath and Elizabeth Bishop Stevenson compares Plath's late autobiographical essay about her childhood, Ocean 1212-W, with Bishop's poetic reminiscence of childhood, 'In the Waiting Room'. Stevenson wrote unusually fully about Correspondences in an essay published in 1979, 'Writing as a Woman'. Correspondences is not only multiple in perspective but generically hybrid. It thus challenges not only the absolute ego of confessionalism, and of Plath's voice as Stevenson understands it, but also the absolute and unique authenticity claimed for poetic utterance in some accounts of Plath's life and work, particularly that of Ted Hughes.
