Aemilia Lanyer addresses the doubtful reader, “know for certaine; that it was delivered unto me in sleepe many years before I had any intention to write in this manner, and was quite out of my memory … what I had dreamed long before …” (139). So ends Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, where Lanyer’s final thought contextualizes poetry between a waking and sleeping world. Poetry positions itself as a medium that is not only comfortable with tension and contradictions but uniquely apt at describing in-between moments of human consciousness that are beyond words. Put another way, poetry describes the uncanny and ineffable with words on the page by concretizing a wakeful sleep or a sleeping reality. This in-between world of poetry can be read through a lens of Gothic critique. While the Gothic in literary analysis has tended to focus on novels, films, and other works of fiction, an ongoing poetic conversation of contentious in-between worlds has been burbling in the text of lyric writers. I argue that Gothic poetry echoes across the poetic conversation through the uncertainty of desolate landscapes and cycles of life and death that become static. Through staticity and lack of resolution, Gothic poetry deepens what John Keats would call “negative capability.” In other words, poetry may be read through a lens of Gothic negative capability that expands the imagery and tropes of Gothic literature.
Lanyer explains that poetry came through sleep and dreams. The idea of channeling poetic inspiration through an ecstatic frenzy is well established. Sharon Thesen’s The Receiver relies on the Black Mountain College tradition of the poet as a conduit for unnameable and unknowable forces of inspiration. Indeed, poetry has been continually linked to the “belief that the genius (‘spirit’) and lunatic (‘driven by the Moon’) are fed from the same springs” (Brogan). “The Receiver,” Thesen’s eponymous poem in The Receiver, shows the relationship between the receiver and the sender in dreams:
You
might wind up playing a role you only dreamed of
such
as being a human voice in a telephone receiver,
the
kind you had to lift out of what was called the cradle
and
replace afterwards in the cradle’s prongs. When it rang
again
with
a sharp European ring she knew it would be him, she knew
it
would be eternal, so she lifted the receiver once more. (5)
Thesen uses the image of an old rotary dial telephone. The speaker picks up the rotary dial phone in their dreams and becomes the receiver. The sender on the other end of the telephone line is unnamed and unknowable in Thesen’s poem. However, that sender is eternal and so the receiver answers the call. Thesen’s use of a familiar and yet unfamiliar object, the old rotary dial phone, creates an uneasy tension of the dream realm where things are knowable and unknowable at once. Both critics and poets characterize poetry through genius and lunacy which can expand the conversation into the Gothic.
In some ways, the sender and receiver model of poetry ascribes poetic invention to unknowable forces. Lanyer and Thesen disappear under divine intervention and eternal voices telephoning from unknown locations. Lanyer’s direct address to the doubtful reader could hint at divine inspiration while Thesen’s spectre-like rotary phone call rings through an unnamed and unknown force that is described as eternal. Still, both poets could fall under the purview of Gothic uncertainty. This reconceptualization of the receiver method, or mad genius method, restores autonomy back to poets. Poets use the in-between of dreaming and wakefulness to explore the depths and uncertainties of the human consciousness. I am less concerned with where inspiration comes from and more concerned with the impact of uncertainty in poetry. Linking uncertainty in poetry to the Gothic recalibrates the conversation to consider the impact of nightmarish imagery on poetry’s ability to enhance and expand negative capability.
I do not intend to survey Gothic Studies as a discipline within my paper. Instead, I want to focus on a narrowing of my use of Gothic as it applies to poetry. Gothic Studies applied to literature represents a diverse, ongoing, and ever-evolving conversation. For example, geopolitical contexts impact the Gothic and its application to literature. Canadian Gothic is distinct from American Gothic. Moreover, Indigenous Gothic as in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach can be classified both as Gothic and refusing Gothic. Oversimplifying the conversation around the Gothic is not my intention. However, by applying a Gothic lens to poetry I present a way to quilt together seemingly unrelated patchwork pieces of poetic traditions.
Before I begin my exploratory argument and survey of poetry through a Gothic lens, I want to clarify the terms I will be using throughout the paper. Firstly, I base my definition of Gothic on Kathleen Nicols’ discussion of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Nicols identifies common Gothic themes, imagery, and tropes in Plath’s work broadly. However, Nicols expands the Gothic to include Plath’s conceptualization of a Cold War apocalypse where the landscape traps the speaker in an unmoving and nightmarish present where history is dead, and the future will never arrive. Put another way, Gothic poetry is more than poems with vampires, ravens, and abandoned monasteries on a misty moor. Gothic poetry creates a static in-between world where speakers and audiences may be trapped in cycles that fail to renew or progress. When I write of the wakeful sleep or the sleeping reality, I mean precisely what Nicols argues: Plath’s unconventional Gothic poetry reflects an immutable nightmare through desolate landscapes and isolated meditations.
Secondly, I rely on Keats’ negative capability to expand Nicols’ discussion of Gothic poetry. Simply put, negative capability is poetry’s unique ability to hold the tensions of the human condition. Often fiction seeks resolution through plot arcs. In contrast, poetry can resist narrative arcs and force the speaker and audience to sit with unresolvable tensions that represent the contradictions and difficulties of the human condition. In other words, poetry does not always have an answer. Strange and lyrical meditations trap people beyond the idea of progress. I link the Gothic to negative capability through Nicols’ Cold War Gothic. Nicols shows how Plath creates a static tension through an expansion of the Gothic that seeks no resolution.
My argument relies on Nicols’ definition of the Gothic which I then merge with negative capability. My paper will discuss the Gothic broadly and then move into a discussion of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.” I begin with Tennyson because “The Lady of Shalott” contains conventional Gothic imagery and themes. Beyond the conventional representations of the Gothic, Tennyson’s poem shows the static nightmare of Gothic poetry leading to a conclusion that reflects negative capability more than Gothic resolution. Thus, “The Lady of Shalott” creates a steppingstone to discussions of poetry that enhance negative capability through staticity. I then consider “The Seafarer.” Finally, I finish my discussion with Sylvia Plath and Roy Kiyooka.
Nicols explains that the Gothic lens relies on medieval Catholic architecture where stone gargoyles and foreboding arches show a protestant fear of the Spanish Inquisition and other atrocities (332). Certainly, the familiar imagery and themes of the Gothic can be identified in poems like Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” or Anne Sexton’s “Her Kind.” Ominous ravens, spooky buildings, and witches burned at the stake make for easy classification of the Gothic. However, such surface level groupings of the Gothic make large portions of the poetic conversation unavailable to a Gothic analysis or approach.
Nicols points out that Plath deals with traditional Gothic themes and imagery. Nonetheless, Nicols conceptualizes of the Gothic in Plath’s poetry through landscapes that remain static and lock the speaker in an immoveable nightmare. Traditional Gothic stories often involve a confrontation of Gothic forces where the Gothic forces are defeated or dissipate (Nicols). Poetry that engages with the Gothic creates new avenues of exploration where speakers and audiences can be static. There is no progress and no resolution in such static spaces. Gothic poetry then allows for the proliferation of Keats’ negative capability.
Jerrold E. Hogle discusses the origins of the American Gothic and Gothic approaches in literary criticism. Hogle explains that the Gothic is anti-thetical to New Criticism which sought to understand organic unity in texts deemed high culture (3). Gothic novels and films were often considered low culture and unworthy of New Critical approaches. Thus, Gothic criticism and Gothic literature had a “... flagrant mixture of different genres and ideologies, an arouser of the fears instigated by visible conflicts between retrogressive and progressive views of the world” (Hogle 4). Although Hogle does not explicitly mention poetry in the discussion of Gothic criticism, the “flagrant mixture of different genres and ideologies” allows for the cacophonous inclusion of poetry. The Gothic makes room for “visible conflicts” in the world (Hogle 4). Opposing binaries manifest through fear and uncertainty: internal self vs. world, self vs. other, tradition and superstition vs. innovation and objectivity, man vs. monster, nightmare vs. waking world and so on. For all the variability in Gothic approaches, the room for conflict and uncertainty through desolate imagery is central to my approach in understanding Gothic poetry. Castles, vampires, misty moors with endless labyrinthine pathways are all hallmarks of the Gothic. But what does it mean to expand the Gothic beyond tropes to a sense of desolation that arises from poetic imagery?
Deepening the connection between the Gothic and poetry that is not typically understood as Gothic is important to my argument. Nicols points out that Sylvia Plath does not get categorized as a Gothic poet. Plath’s poetry, Nicols explains, is not “conventionally marked Gothic” (328). However, Nicols argues that Plath’s poetry shows some hallmarks of Gothic literature through the appearance of the “madwoman” or in allusions to Gothic texts. The major Gothic thrust of Plath’s poetry comes from “the dark and anxious domain of what might be called Cold War Gothic” (Nicols). I do not think Nicols’ Cold War argument applies succinctly to all poetry as it is 20th century context specific. However, the “dark and anxious domain” of desolate landscapes and unresolvable tensions are common to what I call Gothic negative capability.
Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” contains conventional Gothic imagery: a lonely maid stuck in a tower, weaving interminably as she resists an unknown curse and the taunting shadows of a mirror. The spires and towers of Camelot crawl into the sky somewhere down the river. The adventures and warmth of the outside world are lost to the Lady of Shalott: “Four gray walls, and four gray towers. / Overlook a space of flowers, / And the silent isle imbowers” (Tennyson ll. 15-17). Walls and towers encircle the Lady, and she is doomed to never leave the silent isle. Her life remains mostly unknown and only the reapers hear her song and whisper, “’Tis the fair / Lady of Shalott’” (Tennyson 11. 35-36). Conventional Gothic imagery and eeriness proliferate the opening of the poem. The Lady is isolated and seemingly supernatural. Hogle’s Gothic architecture functions as a prison to the Lady and dots the skyline towards Camelot. Looking to the outside world, The Lady longs to escape her prison and break away from the supernatural forces that compel her to weave ceaselessly.
The Lady laments, “ ‘I am half sick of shadows’” (Tennyson l. 71). Since the Lady has no hero, she finds a reprieve from her nightmare in the passing Sir Lancelot. Lancelot’s “coal-black curls” entice her from the curse (Tennyson 1. 104). The disruption of the supernatural forces causes the Lady’s mirror to crack and she knows, “ ‘The curse is come upon me’” (Tennyson l. 116). Supernatural forces will now claim the Lady of Shalott for daring to stop weaving. Surveying the poem broadly, Gothic tropes and imagery are abundant: the stony architecture, the fairy-like woman, mysterious songs in the night, and people caught in supernatural forces. Perhaps if “The Lady of Shalott” was conventionally Gothic Sir Lancelot would find a way to break the Lady’s curse and the isle would no longer be imbowered in silence. Nonetheless, there is no Gothic resolution for the Lady. The Lady does not triumph, and the supernatural forces do not seem to triumph either. In the binary tension between the curse and freedom, nothing wins.
The Lady boards a boat and sets out for Camelot—perhaps thinking she will find her “coal-black” haired Lancelot. As she floats down the river, the people hear her singing as her blood freezes slowly. The people of Camelot gather round her boat as she arrives in the city dead. The Lady’s hopeful hero Lancelot callously muses, “ ‘She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy lend her grace, / The Lady of Shalott’” (Tennyson ll. 169-171). There is no triumph over her curse and the great hero Lancelot can only remark that the Lady might have been beautiful in life. The Lady’s lifeless body floats at the base of the spires and towers of Camelot and there is no sense or reason to the curse that holds her captive in life and now death. The Lady’s death turns away from Gothic resolution because of its senselessness and staticity. If the Lady of Shalott had been the heroine in Jane Eyre perhaps she would arrive back at the spires of Camelot after a soulful meditation undertaken while wandering across misty moors. Instead, The Lady of Shalott is much more like the madwoman Bertha Mason knocking on walls in the night—an unknowable force, ready to set bedchambers aflame. There is no resolution for Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. Bertha’s unending imprisonment culminates in her own fiery death. At this point, I want to qualify my use of Bertha Mason as an analogous stand-in for the madwoman. Bertha Mason is an important character to scholars and writers as she represents myriad intersecting identities across class, race, ethnicity, and disability. I do not want to co-opt Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reclamation of Bertha Mason nor Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Instead, I want to make space for the unresolvable tension of madness in Gothic negative capability. I rely on Nicols’ conceptualization of madness as a hallmark of Gothic poetry present in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. I call back to the idea that poetic genius and poetic lunacy often come from the same spring.
While “The Lady of Shalott” contains conventional Gothic tropes and imagery, the poem departs from conventional Gothic resolutions and gestures towards the subtext of the Gothic. The Lady lives and dies by the whim of an incomprehensible prison and curse. Thus, the poem exemplifies what I call Gothic negative capability. This lack of resolution expands the Gothic in “The Lady of Shalott” so that poetry which does not have conventional Gothic imagery can still be considered through a Gothic lens. I want to focus on the unresolvable tension of “The Lady of Shalott” and apply it to poetry across time and space.
“The Seafarer” is preserved in the Exeter Book and tells the story of a wraecca or exile far from home and sometimes lost at sea. Like the Lady from “The Lady of Shalott” the Seafarer is trapped: “He who lives / most prosperously on land does not understand / how I, careworn and cut off from my kinsmen, / have as an exile endured a winter / on the icy sea.” The divide between those prosperous on shore and the exile stuck in wintry water is stark. Both the Seafarer and the Lady are physically isolated from other people and their struggles are unknown to anyone but themselves. The icy sea is like the stone prison. Desolation encircles the Seafarer and the Lady. Indeed, the Seafarer observes, “There, storms beat the rocky cliffs; the icy-feathered / tern answered them; and often the eagle, / dewy-winged, screeched overhead. / No protector / could console the cheerless heart.” Although the Seafarer makes no explicit mention of a curse, like the one that afflicts the Lady, he is stuck in isolation. “The Seafarer” does differ from “The Lady of Shalott” in that the poem progresses into a didactic meditation on how money will not save man from impending death and judgment from God.
The Seafarer faces the same unresolvable tension as the Lady of Shalott: “And the cuckoo, too, harbinger of summer, / sings in a mournful voice, boding bitter sorrow / to the heart.” The observation that even a harbinger of summer sings mournfully and brings bitter sorrow shows the negative capability of poetry. The poem progresses to resolution with the didactic messages the Seafarer has for the reader. However, that progression functions as a rationalization of the senselessness and desolation of exile. The Seafarer’s musings about God and gold ring hollow like Lancelot’s short elegy for the Lady of Shalott. Arguably, “The Seafarer” establishes exile and desolation and finds no real triumph over that exile and desolation.
“The Lady of Shalott” and “The Seafarer” fill the reader with dread as cycles of exile never end. The Lady weaves interminably only to escape and die. The Seafarer faces dire loneliness and extreme physical conditions only to arrive at the conclusion that all people die and monetary success is meaningless. Although the Gothic negative capability readings of “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Seafarer” sound pessimistic for the prognosis on humanity, I argue that unresolvable tensions do not create hopelessness. Instead, the unresolvable tensions of “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Seafarer” invite the audience to sit in discomfort and slow down contemplation. Resolution focused approaches often forego nuance and tension. The madwoman knocking from behind the walls goes ignored as she is diminished and erased in favor of resolution and triumph. Gothic negative capability allows the madwoman to live, just as she is.
Sylvia Plath is often the face of 20th century confessional poetry. Conversations about Plath frequently involve her biography: mental illness, a tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes, multiple suicide attempts, and her untimely death before she could even reach middle age. Balancing discussions of poetry with the context of biography is difficult. Nevertheless, when I consider Plath, I want to focus on the Gothic negative capability in the poems. Just as Tennyson’s biography did not factor into the Lady of Shalott’s unresolvable plight, I will not consider Plath’s biography as a part of my discussion. I depart from Nicols’ discussion of Plath as Nicols incorporates biographical information about Plath into readings of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” for example. Instead, I read Plath’s “Elm” as a continuation of Gothic negative capability.
“Elm” offers evocative sound imagery through a strange collage of descriptions: “Is it the sea you hear in me, / Its dissatisfactions? / Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness” (Plath 27)? The speaker asks if the “you” hears the hollow conch shell sound of the sea or nothingness that communicates madness. The vacuous conch shell sound juxtaposes with galloping, “All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, / Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, / Echoing, echoing” (Plath 27). The concrete sound images clash between soothing sea sounds, nothingness, and galloping across turf like horses’ hooves at a polo match. Plath expands sound in the poem with a synesthetic metaphor where the speaker asks, “Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons” (27)? Poison would be perceptible through taste in bitterness and sourness. Moreover, poison might activate touch through tingling or burning. In the poem, poison is given a sound which adds an unusual layer to the evocative sound imagery that precedes it. In the following line Plath return to the hushing sound of the sea in a hollow space, “This is rain now, this big hush” (27). The sounds of “Elm” run in a nightmarish sequence where real sounds are indistinguishable from galloping entities and madness in nothing. Whirring white noise crescendos into synesthetic metaphor that crosses the senses and collapses back on itself in hushed rain. Sound imagery establishes the in-between space of Gothic negative capability.
Returning to “The Lady of Shalott,” Gothic tropes come through the unknown fairy-like singing that only the reapers hear. Sound imagery establishes Gothic eeriness in “The Lady of Shalott” and Plath’s “Elm.” Synesthetic metaphor carries the closing stanza of “Elm” where the speaker explains, “Its snaky acids hiss. / It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults / That kill, that kill, that kill” (28). While acid can create a hissing sound when contacting certain materials, here the acid can cross the senses. The collection of nightmarish sounds show the speaker’s isolation and fill the audience with unknown dread. The Lady cannot escape her curse and the speaker of “Elm” is unable to reconcile the nightmarish sound symphony that permeates her consciousness. The concrete Gothic imagery of “The Lady of Shalott” and “Elm” make room for keening madness and isolation and again demand that the audience sit with unresolvable tensions that rise and fall with no end.
Joy Harjo, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, explains how poetry brought her in:
Poetry approached me in that chaos of raw inverted power and leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, said, “You need to learn how to listen, you need grace, you need to learn how to speak. You’re coming with me.” I did not walk off into the sunset with poetry, or hit the town with a blaze of gunfire guarding my back. Rather, the journey toward poetry worked exactly as the process of writing a poem. It started from the inside out, then turned back in to complete a movement. (xix)
Harjo describes the negative capability of poetry. Poetry asks Harjo to both listen and to speak. Moreover, poetry did not solve Harjo’s problems by walking off into the sunset or taking a last stand in a blaze of gunfire. Poetry is static and in-between. Harjo can both listen and speak through the unmoveable moment of negative capability. As with previously considered poems in this paper, Harjo’s poetry shows Gothic negative capability specifically.
The prose poem “Invisible Fish” shows unresolvable cycles where layers of contradiction are allowed to exist: “Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock” (Harjo 60). Invisible fish are the phantasmagoric ancestors of mankind that evolved and grew to “come ashore and paint dreams on the drying stone” (Harjo 60). The short prose poem finishes with the image of the dreamers’ descendants in a pickup truck headed to the store. While “Invisible Fish” does not conjure the same isolation and fear as “The Lady of Shalott,” “The Seafarer,” and “Elm,” the poem still has an unresolvable tension through its strangeness. The layers of humanity exist all in one moment: the invisible fish ancestors, the dream painters, and the people in trucks carrying out mundane errands like going to the store. The Gothic negative capability of “Invisible Fish” occurs through its capacity to layer with no resolution. None of the iterations of the humans as invisible fish, dreamy rock painters, or plain pickup truck people represent the best or strongest version of mankind. Instead, time and space are collapsed into a single moment where the audience can both hear and speak to experience as Harjo explains. The poem becomes a moment or a movement with no resolution. Ancient ancestor ghosts loop on repeat appearing with vestigial dreaminess. My discussion of Harjo’s “Invisible Fish” is perhaps the furthest departure from conventional Gothic imagery and tropes. However, “Invisible Fish” resists resolution and creates negative capability through its dream-like imagery.
Roy Kiyooka’s The Fountainbleau Dream Machine enhances the discussion of dreaminess in Gothic negative capability. Mirroring Thesen’s sender/receiver model through the rotary dial telephone, Kiyooka’s longpoem asks, “at the Port of Dreams you never need a Passport / ask the Eagle, ‘who dreamt you’” (250)? The long poem contains a collage of physical images mixed with poetry on the page. The assemblage of images above the line “ ‘who dreamt you’” conjures a dream-like portal where hot-air balloons float in clouds that seem like linens caught in the sky. The juxtaposition between the images on the page and the text echoes Plath’s synesthetic metaphor in “Elm.” When the senses cross, the reader moves into the in-between world of wakefulness and sleeping: “ … the Dream with its / intricate Flotation-System hovers—motion less—above” (Kiyooka 250). Kiyooka’s strange imagery shows the relationship between dreaming and Gothic negative capability. Dreams and Gothic negative capability in poetry create space for no answers and no resolutions. Genius and lunacy are allowed to exist. The madwoman lives forever in her cycles. She goes nowhere and receives messages only she can hear while she is not awake and not asleep.
Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” serves as a foundational text in Gothic negative capability. The Lady is surrounded by Gothic architecture and Gothic tropes. In other words, Tennyson’s poem is an easily identifiable Gothic text. Although “The Lady of Shalott” sorts neatly into the Gothic category, the poem resists Gothic resolutions where protagonists triumph over supernatural forces. The Lady’s death and Lancelot’s subsequent commentary opens negative capability in the poem. The Lady of Shalott is never rescued from the curse. Like the Lady, the Seafarer of the eponymous “The Seafarer,” finds “no protection” from the isolation of exile. The Seafarer looks at the senselessness of death and tries to override exile with lessons about God and gold. Despite the Seafarer’s attempt at a didactic conclusion in the face of Gothic negative capability, the Seafarer still explains that exile, and all life, always end in death. Both the Lady and the Seafarer have no escape or resolution.
Plath’s “Elm” deepens the discussion of Gothic negative capability through sonorous imagery that transports the reader into a waking nightmare where sounds morph across the senses. “Elm” shows again that poetry remains uniquely positioned to push lunacy to the forefront of a text. Like “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Seafarer,” “Elm” offers no ultimate triumph of the hero over uncanny forces. The nightmarish synesthetic metaphor of “Elm” is echoed in the dream-like imagery of Harjo’s “Invisible Fish.” Again, Harjo offers no solution to the reader and allows the layered tensions of human evolution to co-exist in time and space collapsed in a pickup truck. Kiyooka’s long poem The Fountainbleau Dream Machine invites the audience to dream and find no solution to the question of “Who dreamt you?” Not all poetry becomes clearer under the microscope of Gothic negative capability. However, some poetry finds its place between the waking and dream worlds, weaving tensions together ceaselessly.
Works Cited
Crow, Charles L, editor. A Companion to American Gothic. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1388810.
Brogan, T.V.F. "Poetic Madness." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Roland Green, et al., Princeton University Press, 4th edition, 2012. Credo Reference, http://ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/prpoetry/poetic_madness/0?institutionId=261. Accessed 19 Nov. 2022.
Ferguson, Margaret W., et al., editors. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems. W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
Hogle, Jerrold E. “The Progress of Theory and the Study of the American Gothic.” A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013, pp. 3-15.
Kiyooka, Roy. “The Fontainebleau Dream Machine.” The Long Poem Anthology, edited by Michael Ondaatje, Coach House Press, 1979, pp. 246–265.
Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer. Edited by Susanne Wood, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Nicols, Kathleen L. “The Cold War Gothic Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” A Companion to American Gothic, edited by Charles L. Crow, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013, pp. 328-339.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2005.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “The Lady of Shalott.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry, edited by Margaret Ferguson et al., 6th ed., Norton, 2018, pp. 1034–1038.
“The Seafarer.” Crossley-Holland, Kevin, translator. The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 53-56.
Thesen, Sharon. The Receiver. New Star Books, 2017.
Cristalle Smith is published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Room Magazine, QWERTY Magazine, The Maynard, and elsewhere. Cristalle won subTerrain Magazine’s Lush Triumphant Literary Awards for Creative Nonfiction in 2020. She has a chapbook with Frog Hollow Press and is a PhD student at the University of Calgary in Creative Writing.
