Egg-Head and Suicide Off Egg Rock

I'm not going to count it as one of my Official Blog Posts, but I thought it would be good to include my final paper for this class in the blog.

A Comparison of Ted Hughes’s “Egg-Head” and Sylvia Plath’s “Suicide off Egg Rock”

Diane Middlebrook’s article “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: call and response” details the complex ways that Plath and Hughes communicated with each other through their poetry. From the moment of their first meeting to works published after their deaths, their poetry was in constant dialogue. Some dialogues consisted of several poems by both poets; others were single instances of borrowing. By deconstructing the two poems and comparing their form, it can be made evident that the poems “Egg-Head” by Ted Hughes and “Suicide off Egg Rock” by Sylvia Plath, while centering around two vastly different subjects, have more in common with one another than what may appear at first glance.

Regarding Papers

Usually when I need to write a paper for a class, I choose a topic on which I am certain, and write a certain paper from it. I always know where I am planning on going- maybe not how I'm going to get to it, but the point that I am trying to make is always clear. It's dull, but it makes for a solid paper.

This class is a little different from my experience with other courses, though- it's more exploratory, and with that I decided to do something a little different with my paper. It took me a long, long time to decide on which poems I was going to do my paper on, but finally I decided- "The Egg-Head" by Hughes has always evaded any sort of sense for me, and "Suicide off Egg Rock" by Sylvia Plath held some interesting similarities to it. I would compare the two, see if I could find any malleable similarities.

Before I compared the two poems I would have to understand them, first. I started with Egg-Head: I had the most trouble with dissecting that one. One paragraph became two paragraphs became the entire paper-- I had spent the entire report decoding Hughes' poem.

Woops.

I was worried about that for a while: the paper didn't have the format that I was used to at all for school papers. It didn't seem to argue a single point to me. It took me a while to realise that the whole process was a debate- this was my interpretation of the immense denseness that was the Egg-Head. This also gives me a topic for the next paper-- granted that I don't spend five more pages dissecting "Suicide off Egg Rock".