PUBLIC LECTURE: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: the hazards of incompleteness

You are invited to a free public lecture by

Professor John Beer Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Cambridge University Wednesday, 12 October 2005 at 6pm

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: the hazards of incompleteness

Consideration of these two writers has come as the culmination of work in which John Beer investigates the nature of ‘Being’, as explored by a succession of writers from the Romantics onwards. Ted Hughes’s preoccupation with this issue is evident from the title of his account of Shakespeare in 'Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being'. John Beer has come to feel that the central difference between Hughes and Sylvia Plath can be traced to the difference between a man who takes his own being for granted and a woman who accepts her own fragmentariness and nevertheless strives towards some kind of unity.

Profile: John Beer is one of the preeminent scholars and critics of English romanticism. Renowned for its great depth and immense scholarship, Beer's work has shed light on some of the most complex and vital poets – Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge – and revealed the power of poetry to transform the thought of its day through its visionary pursuit of truth.

John Beer is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse. He has written Coleridge the Visionary (1959); The Achievement of E.M. Forster (1963); Blake's Humanism (1968); Blake's Visionary Universe (1969); Wordsworth and the Human Heart (1979), Wordsworth in Time (1979); Coleridge's Variety: Bicentenary Studies (ed.) (1974); Coleridge's Poetic Intelligence (1977); and Romantic Influences: Contemporary-Victorian-Modern (1994). Professor Beer has also edited Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (Collected Coleridge) (1993) and his Poems (1993).

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