Declan Kiberd (Prof Anglo-Irish Literature, UCD)
If the century now ending was the "age of extremes", Sylvia Plath can be considered one of its representative poets. People said that after Auschwitz the creation of poetry was unthinkable, yet here was a woman who, in the words of a fellow-artist, "carried a concentration-camp around in her mind". A ferocious lyric like Lady Lazarus isn't only about the fascist's appalling search for victims: however: it suggests there may be something barbaric about the urge to adore. It is really an exploration of the whole process of martyrdom, on those who victimise martyrs and on those who then deify them.
Part of her poetry's power is that it seems spoken by a voice that is among the dead. She died young but wrote six or seven lasting poems which captured, somehow, the intense madness of our century and yet managed to record and report it with stunning clarity.
Paula Meehan (Poet)
People know her for her death, but you only have to read the Collected Poems to know she is much more than a fashionable writer. Her flowering so young was similar to that of Shelley and Keats, and she had similar energies - that intense sense of the fatedness of her life, her prophetic death.
Poets have a long history of psychic disturbances; we try to keep ourselves warm and stable. But the intensity can have an unhinging effect.
Plath lived at a time when literary London wasn't hospitable to a young mother, and she did make the personal political. The whole area of who's telling the truth is confusing. I'm not in the business of apportioning blame, as some other people do. I do feel compassion for Hughes, who is himself a monument, a survivor.
Barrie Cooke (Artist)
Someone told me I should meet Ted Hughes because we shared many interests. So we corresponded for about a year, then met in London where Ted and Sylvia had a flat, not far from Regent's Park Zoo. Frieda was born there. They took turns working, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. He was very supportive of her. My two eldest children are the same age as Nick and Frieda, so we had other things in common. You see, we are both countrymen. What's that? A country person is someone who goes to the city for a holiday. That's a difference in human kind - city people come to the country for a charge. Ted's art is rural-based, as is mine. He is a wonderful writer. We made a series of lithographs and a poem together about 15 years ago - about the great Irish Pike. We still fish together every year. Do I know a good place for pike fishing? Yes, but I won't tell you. Nor would he.
Geraldine Plunkett (Actor)
I first really encountered Sylvia Plath's work when I performed in a two-hander directed by Avril MacRory, based on Let- ters Home. Fidelma O'Dowda and I played Sylvia and her mother, Aurelia. I really admired the way she used language. We changed roles as the play developed, the mother and daughter changing places, as Sylvia herself wrote about. I'm not an expert on her by any means, but when I was asked to pick a poem for Lifelines, I picked her last poem, Edge.
Ailbhe Smith (Director of Women's Studies, UCD)
Without Plath, the whole way in which we know ourselves as white Western women might be very different. No one group can ever hijack her achievements. The whole area of agency and selfhood for women was so close to her that it is hard now to say who wasn't influenced by her. She is absolutely germinal - there are crossovers from Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton to younger poets like Eavan Boland.
Her syntax is so extraordinary. She caught the Zeitgeist, she recognised the sound. She exposed the whole underbelly of domesticity as a place of intimate power relations between women and men. I'm not surprised that Ted Hughes honours her by writing about her now. For both, the relationship resonated.
Richard Murphy (Poet)
(Days before they separated, Sylvia and Ted visited Murphy in Cleggan, where Tom Kinsella joined them for dinner. Murphy wrote his account for Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson's Plath biography. Extracts follow.)
What he admitted was that after six or seven years that had been marvellously creative for him, the marriage had somehow become destructive, and he thought the best thing to do was to give it a rest by going to Spain for six months. Assia's name was not mentioned, but her role was implied.
Some time during the meal, in the presence of Ted and Tom, though not noticed by them, Sylvia rubbed her leg against mine under the table, provocatively. It made me inwardly recoil. My own marriage had begun to break up after a literary guest had seduced my wife on a weekend visit in 1957. I did not want to break up Sylvia's marriage, or have a secret affair with her, or be used to make Ted jealous . . . She could not, she said, imagine either Ted or herself truly married to anyone else. Their union had been so complete, on every level, that she felt nothing could really destroy this.