April 9, 1980
British novelist, essayist, and critic A. Alvarez lectured on his friend, the American poet, novelist and short story writer Sylvia Plath in Josselyn House. Alvarez’s The Shaping Spirit: Studies in Modern English and American Poets (1958) was an influential and formative study, and the first section of his The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (1972) is about Plath, who took her own life in 1963. The book, he wrote, “begins with a memoir of Sylvia Plath, not simply as a tribute to her since I think she was one of the most gifted writers of our time, but also as a matter of emphasis… so that whatever theories or abstractions follow can somehow be rooted in the human particular. … I have tried to chart the shifts and confusions of feeling which led up to Sylvia’s death as I understand them, and as objectively as I am able.” A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicides