Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Karen V. Kukil’s featured lecture on “Sylvia Plath’s Women and Poetry” from the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium at the University of Oxford on October ...

The publication in February of Birthday Letters, a new collection of poems by Ted Hughes, immediately placed Smith in the eye of a media frenzy. In the book, Hughes--Britain's poet laureate and the ...