Chapter 4 - Plath and the Radio Drama

Summary

Andrew Walker writes from the premise that one of Plath’s most notable characteristics is her sense of the dramatic, her experimentation with multiple voices and personas. Walker establishes Plath’s long-held interest in radio drama growing up in America, and the impact of contemporary radio dramas and BBC’s the Third Programme on her work. Plath’s radio play, Three Women, is influenced by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood as well as Ted Hughes’s A Houseful of Women and The Wound, which appear during key phases in Plath’s poetic development. Walker accounts for a dramatic shift between Plath’s earlier and later work, and demonstrates the importance of an oft-overlooked, yet highly vital, poetic context.