Poets with a certain reputation...?

[toruwatanabe]

Whether or not a poet's work is affected by the fact that they had an odd reputation? Ie. Ted HUghes and SYlvia PLaths relationship sometimes overshadowed their individual works

[JBI]

Wouldn't matter. The fame of Sylvia Plath is largely linked to her death. As a poet she is second rate at best, and to me at least, seems quite derivative. Ted Hughes was a good poet, but I would argue, not a great poet, though definitely the better of the pair. Their lives if anything helped maintain their works out of extinction.

[dramasnot6]

Plath is brilliant! I much prefer her work to Hughes, I think a great deal of it is up to opinion. I read her poetry before I even knew what she was, and was really struck by the brilliance of "Daddy".
It's hard to differentiate between the life and the works,sure,but that is because the two work together. Experience fuels poetry.

[JBI]

Daddy is a disgusting poem. I just find it nervy how some upper-class privileged woman can compare her situation to a Jew in a Concentration Camp. What sort of nerve posses her to do that? It isn't as if her father molested her or anything.

[toruwatanabe]

Ahh I see your point that their fame helped ease them out of extinction. Personally I like Plath and Hughes work, and knew about Hughes before I knew he was married to Plath, but knew Plath's "reputation" before I read her work.

I don't think the point she is making in 'Daddy' is a comparison as such, more as a use of language to propell you into feeling enraged about the question in hand rather than the all-round question that was the holocaust.

Back to the main point, so do you reckon a lot of poets and authors would have been forgotten about had their reputation not been revealed? Who else had a larger-than-life personality or reputation?

[JCamilo]

Reputation is irrelevant. Does anyone care if Virginia Woolf was rather obnoxious, if Poe could not stop drinking, etc ? Some people does, but Poe's bottle have nothing to do with the fact that everyone knows a certain black bird.
Now it affects their writing? Of course, just like any artist is affected by his life. It affects the fame? So ? Sylvia Plath is indeed a very irregular poet, second rate, with some momments of creativity and talent. Maybe a few more years she would have been better. Her life with Hughes, her suicide made her a muse of shorts? Yes, but this is helped because her good poems sustained it. Otherwise she would be just one more woman that killed herself.