Chapter 4 discusses the literary, cultural, and political influence of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Faust legend in the works of Plath and her contemporaries. The chapter examines Plath’s textual engagement with Faustian plays and the way in which she seeks inspiration from the themes of the texts from her juvenilia until her late poetry. The historical, religious, psychoanalytical, and political interpretations of demons, demonic possession, and diabolism were present in post-war discourses, borrowing the vocabulary from the well-known play about a black magician and Mephistopheles. The chapter revises over-simplified narratives around Plath’s use of vocabulary associated with diabolism to show her knowledge of the subject that influenced her and demonstrates that American poets, such as Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, and John Berryman also employed Faustian themes in their poetry. It concludes that the Faust legend had significant role in post-war literature and culture, re-interpreting the meaning of diabolism and sin within the mid-century political landscape.

Chapter 3 describes the influence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and The Tempest on Plath’s poetry and prose, focusing on the gendered concepts of witchcraft and magic. The chapter contextualises Plath’s depiction of maternal malice and paternal control in the framework of twentieth-century interpretations of Macbeth’s witches and Prospero from The Tempest. It addresses the mythological origins of the female trio as metaphysical beings with divinatory powers who, for Plath, embody the inescapable maternal presence. The chapter outlines the similarities between Prospero’s magical power and the beekeeping of Plath’s father figure as a magical-scholarly power. In her writings, likewise seeks inspiration from her childhood, reimagining her Atlantic seascape as the magic island from The Tempest in which Prosperoean father emerges as an idealised and dominant figure. The chapter concludes that Plath’s allusions to the early modern supernatural figures were shaped and paralleled by post-war interpretations and poetic retellings. They reflect on the gendered understanding of magical power as a sinister and benevolent controlling force.

Chapter 6 introduces the concepts associated with supernatural transformations, metamorphosis, shapeshifting, and hybridity, each expressing a different approach to the transformation of the female body. Plath’s poems frequently seek inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which she interrogates the powerlessness of women who transform from human to vegetal form. The chapter situates Plath’s poetic narratives among her female contemporaries, such as Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and even Margaret Atwood, who rely on feminist retellings of classical myths to question concerns about women’s autonomy and social position. The chapter outlines Plath’s employment of the concept of shapeshifting, associated with witches and folkloric beliefs, to reflect on the liberatory powers the animal form (often flying creatures) offers to women. It also argues that Plath experiments with the fluid boundaries between the human and the nonhuman in one of her most well-known poems, ‘Ariel,’ which portrays an imaginative flying motion as transformation.

The third chapter turns to the body in erotic poetry. Here the temporal frame widens to embrace the experience of the present within longer human spans, a rhythm over lifetimes garnered through instances of erotic embodiment. Poetry can bind the inexplicable presence of touch to time, and can also summon the past as presence through the reenactment of the poem itself in performance, a dynamic we see at work in Sappho and then again in the modern erotic poetry of Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds – begging the question of why certain poetics recur across time. This is poetry that challenges the ephemerality of embodied experience by showing its power to reenact the force of touch.

This chapter discusses the poets associated with the so-called “Middle Generation,” a transitional group of writers who were younger than the modernists but older than the poets of the New American poetry discussed in Chapters 1–4. It addresses how the poets of this cohort struggled with the long shadow of their modernist predecessors and addresses their struggles with alcoholism, personal crises, and mental illness. The chapter charts their move away from the New Critical formalist mode that reigned at mid-century toward a looser, more personal mode, which eventually gave rise to Confessional poetry. Focusing especially on Elizabeth Bishop (who distanced herself from Confessionalism), Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, this chapter discusses the major stylistic and thematic features of Confessionalism, controversies surrounding this movement, and its profound influence on contemporary poetry.