SYLVIA PLATH: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

General Editor: B. C. Southam

The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of

criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the
contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student
to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and
its place within a literary tradition.

The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the

history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little
published documentary material, such as letters and diaries.

Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in

order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the
writer's death.
 SYLVIA PLATH
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Edited by

LINDA WAGNER-MARTIN

R
London and New York
 First published in 1988
Reprinted in 1997 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park,

Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
&
270 Madison Ave,
NewYorkNY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

Compilation, introduction, notes and index

© 1988 Linda Wagner-Martin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBNlO: 0-415-15942-3 (hbk)

ISBNlO: 0-415-56895-1 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-15942-5 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-56895-1 (pbk)
ISBN 0-415-15946-6 (set)

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality
of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in
the original may be apparent.
 General Editor's Preface

The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near-

contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of
literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of
criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical
attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private
comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight
upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the
period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer's
historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and
his response to these pressures.
The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a
record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly
productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-
century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in
these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most
important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for
their representative quality-perhaps even registering incompre-
hension!
For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials
are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended,
sometimes far beyond the writer's lifetime, in order to show the
inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to
appear.
In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction,
discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of
the author's reception to what we have come to identify as the
critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material
which would otherwise be difficult of access and it is hoped that the
modem reader will be thereby helped towards an informed
understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and
judged.
B.C.S.

v
For Bob
 Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
INTRODUCTION I
ABBREVIATIONS 25
NOTE ON THE TEXT 26

Meeting Sylvia Plath

I ELINOR KLEIN 27
2 JANE BALTZELL KOPP 28
3 IRENE V. MORRIS 28
4 CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON 29
5 ANNE SEXTON 30
The Colossus and Other Poems {I96o)
6 'The Ransom Note,' Manchester
BERNARD BERGONZI,
Guardian, November I900 32
7 JOHN WAIN, 'Farewell to the World,' Spectator,
January I96I 33
8 A. ALVAREZ, 'The Poet and the Poetess,' Observer,
December I900 34
9 ROY FULLER, review, London Magazine, March I96I 35
IO A. E. DYSON, review, Critical Quarterly, Summer
I96I 36
I I Unsigned review, Times Literary Supplement, August
I96I 4I

The Colossus and Other Poems {I962)

I2 E. LUCAS MYERS, 'The Tranquilized Fifties,' Sewanee
Review, January-March I962 42
I3 JUDSON JEROME, 'A Poetry Chronicle-Part 1,' Anti-
och Review, Spring I963 44
I4 RICHARD HOWARD, review, Poetry, March I963 45
IS MARK LINENTHAL, 'Sensibility and Reflection from
the Poet's Comer,' San Francisco Sunday Chronicle,
This World, March I963 47

Vll
 CONTENTS

I6 NICHOLAS KING, 'Poetry: A Late Summer Roundup,'

New York Herald- Tribune Book Review, August I962 48
I7 IAN HAMILTON, 'Poetry,' London Magazine, July
I963 48

The Bell jar (Victoria Lucas, I963)

I8 Unsigned review, 'Under the Skin,' Times Literary

Supplement, January I963 52
I9 LAURENCE LERNER, 'New Novels,' Listener, January
I963 53

Ariel (I965)
20 A. ALVAREZ, 'Poetry in Extremis,' Observer, March
I965 55
2I Unsigned review, 'Along the Edge,' Times Literary
Supplement, November I965 58
22 M. L. ROSENTHAL, 'Poets of the Dangerous Way,'
Spectator, March I965 6o
23 Unsigned review, 'Poems for the Good-Hearted,'
The Times, November I965 62
24 PETER DALE, '"0 Honey Bees Come Build,"' Agen-
da, Summer I966 62
25 STEPHEN SPENDER, 'Warnings from the Grave,' New
Republic, June I966 69
26 P. N. FURBANK, 'New Poetry,' Listener, March I965, 73
27 HUGH KENNER, 'Arts and the Age, On Ariel,'
Triumph, September 1966 74
28 JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN, 'Plath, Jarrell, Kinnell,
Smith,' Partisan Review, Winter I967 78
29 RICHARD TILLINGHAST, 'Worlds of Their Own,'
Southern Review, Spring 1969 79
30 PETER DAVISON, 'Inhabited by a Cry: The Last Poetry
of Sylvia Plath,' Atlantic Monthly, August 1966 So
31 IRVING FELDMAN, 'The Religion of One,' Book Week,
June I966 84
32 Unsigned review, 'Russian Roulette,' Newsweek,
June I966 88
33 ROBIN SKELTON, review, Massachusetts Review,
Autumn I965 90
viii
 CONTENTS

The Colossus and Other Poems (reissue, 1967, 1968)

34 Unsigned review, 'Chained to the Parish Pump,'
Times Literary Supplement, March 1967 92
35 M. L. ROSENTHAL, 'Metamorphosis of a Book,'
Spectator, April 1967 92
37 JAMES TULIP, 'Three Women Poets,' Poetry Australia,
I>ecember 1967 95

The BellJar (Sylvia Plath, reissue, 1966)

37 c. B. cox, 'Editorial,' Critical Quarterly, Autumn
1966 99
38 STEPHEN WALL, review, Observer, September 1966 100

The BellJar (Sylvia Plath, New York, 1971)

39 J. D. o'HARA, 'An American I>ream Girl,' Washington
Post Book World, April 1971 101
40 SAUL MALOFF, 'Waiting for the Voice to Crack,'
New Republic, May 1971 103
41 MASON HARRIS, 'The Bell Jar,' West Coast Review,
October 1973 107
42 GEOFFREY WOLFF, 'The Bell Jar,' Newsweek, April
1971 113
43 MARGARET L. SHOOK, 'Sylvia Plath: The Poet and the
College,' Smith Alumnae Quarterly, April 1972 114
44 TERESA DE LAURETIS, 'Rebirth in The Bell Jar,'
Women's Studies, 1976 124

Crossing the Water (1971)

45 DOMENICA PATERNO, 'Poetry,' Library Journal,
October 1971 135
46 EILEEN M. AIRD, review, Critical Quarterly, Autumn
1971 136
47 DOUGLAS DUNN, 'I>amaged Instruments,' Encounter,
August 1971 139
48 VICTOR HOWES, 'I am Silver and Exact,' Christian
Science Monitor, September 1971 142
49 ROBERT BOYERS, 'On Sylvia Plath,' Salmagundi,
Winter 1973 144
IX
 CONTENTS

50 TERRY EAGLETON, 'New Poetry,' Stand, 1971-2 152

51 PETER PORTER, 'Collecting Her Strength,' New States-
man, June 1971 155
52 PAUL WEST, 'Crossing the Water,' Book World (Chicago
Tribune), January 1972 157
53 VICTOR KRAMER, 'Life-and-Death Dialectics,' Modern
Poetry Studies, 1972 161

Winter Trees (1971, 1972)

54 Unsigned review, 'A World in Disintegration,'

Times Literary Supplement, December 1971 165
55 LINDA RAY PRATT, '"The Spirit of Blackness is in
Us ... ,"' Prairie Schooner, Spring 1973 168
56 ROGER SCRUTON, 'Sylvia Plath and the Savage God,'
Spectator, December 1971 171
57 JOYCE CAROL OATES, 'Winter Trees,' Library Journal,
November 1972 175
58 DAMIAN GRANT, 'Winter Trees,' Critical Quarterly,
Spring 1972 177
59 RAYMOND SMITH, 'Late Harvest,' Modern Poetry
Studies, 1972 179
6o JAMES FINN COTTER, 'Women Poets: Malign Neg-
lect?' America, February 1973 182
61 INGRID MELANDER, review, Moderna Spriik, 1971 184
62 ERIC HOMBERGER, 'The Uncollected Plath,' New
Statesman, September 1972 187
63 EILEEN M. AIRD, '"Poem for a Birthday" to Three
Women: Development in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath,'
Critical Quarterly, Winter 1979 191

Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Correspondence 1950-1963

(1975)

64 ERICA JONG, 'Letters Focus Exquisite Rage of Sylvia

Plath,' Los Angeles Times Book Review, November
1975 204
65 ANNE TYLER,"'The Voice Hangs On, Gay, Tremu-
lous,"' National Observer, January 1976 210
66 JO BRANS, '"The Girl Who Wanted to be God,"'
Southwest Review, Summer 1976 213

X
 CONTENTS

67 MARTHA DUFFY, 'Two Lives,' Time, November I975 2I6

68 CAROL BERE, 'Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-
1963,' Ariel, October I977 2I9
69 ROSE KAMEL, "'Reach Hag Hands and Haul Me In":
Matrophobia in the Letters of Sylvia Plath,' North-
west Review, I98I 223

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose

and Diary Excerpts (I977. I979)
70 DOUGLAS HILL, 'Living and Dying,' Canadian Forum,
June
I978 234
7I LORNA SAGE, 'Death and Marriage,' Times Literary
Supplement, October I977 237
72 G. s. FRASER, 'Pass to the Centre,' Listener, October
I977 243
73 MELODY ZAJDEL, 'Apprenticed in a Bible of Dreams:
Sylvia Plath's Short Stories,' Critical Essays on Sylvia
Plath, I984 245

The Collected Poems ofSylvia Plath (I98I)

74 LAURENCE LERNER, 'Sylvia Plath,' Encounter, January
I982 259
75 WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD, 'An Interesting Minor Poet?'
New Republic, December I98I 262
76 DAVE SMITH, 'Syliva Plath, the Electric Horse,'
American Poetry Review, January I982 268
77 MICHAEL KIRKHAM, 'Sylvia Plath,' Queen's Quarterly,
Spring I984 276
78 MICHAEL HULSE, 'formal Bleeding,' Spectator,
November I98I 29I
79 MARJORIE PERLOFF, 'Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems,'
Resources for American Literary Study, Autumn 198I 293

The Journals ofSylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (I982)

So MARNI JACKSON, 'In Search of the Shape Within,'
Maclean's Magazine, May 1982 304
8I LINDA W. WAGNER, 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath,'
Contemporary Literature, Winter 1983 3o6

xi
 CONTENTS

82 MIRIAM LEVINE,'The journals of Sylvia Plath,' Amer-

ican Book Review, May-June 1983 308
83 STEVEN GOULD AXELROD, 'The Second Destruction of
Sylvia Plath,' American Poetry Review, March-April
1985 313
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 320
INDEX 323

xu
 Acknowledgments

For permission to reprint copyright material, and for answering

queries, acknowledgment is due to the following: Agenda for No.
24; Eileen M. Aird for Nos 46 and 63; Antioch Review for No. 13,
first published in the Antioch Review, vol. 23, no. 1 (Spring 1963)
(Copyright© 1963 by The Antioch Review, Inc. Reprinted by
permission of the editors); Ariel for No. 68; Steven Gould Axelrod
for No. 83; Bernard Bergonzi for No. 6; Robert Boyers for No. 49;
Jo Brans and the Southwest Review for No. 66; Canadian Forum for
No. 70; Christian Science Monitor for No. 48 (© 1971 The Christian
Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved); James Finn Cotter
and America for No. 6o; C. B. Cox and the Critical Quarterly for
No. 37; Peter Davison for No. 30; A. E. Dyson for No. 10; P. N.
Furbank for No. 26; Damian Grant for No. 58; Mason Harris and
West Coast Review for No. 41; Eric Hornberger for No. 62; Richard
Howard and Poetry for No. 14; Ericajong for No. 64; Rose Kamel
for No. 69; Hugh Kenner for No. 27; Michael Kirkham and
Queen's Quarterly for No. 77; Elinor Klein for No. 1; Laurence
Lerner for Nos 19 and 74; Miriam Levine for No. 82; Library
Journal for Nos 45 and 57; London Magazine for Nos 9 and 17;
Maclean's Magazine for No. So; Massachusetts Review for No. 33 (©
1965 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.); Modem Poetry Studies for
Nos 53 and 59; Moderna Spriik for No. 61; the Registrar of the Roll,
Newnham College, Cambridge, for No.3, from Newnham College
Roll Letter; New Republic for Nos 25, 40, and 75 (© 1966, 1971,
1981, The New Republic, Inc. Reprinted by permission); News-
week for Nos 32 and 42 (Copyright 1966 and 1971 by Newsweek,
Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission); Observer for
Nos 8, 20, and 38; Partisan Review for No. 28; Poetry Australia for
No. 36; Resources for American Literary Study for No. 79; M. L.
Rosenthal for Nos 22 and 35; San Francisco Chronicle for No. 15 (@
San Francisco Chronicle, 1963); Sewanee Review for No. 12, first
published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (Spring 1962)
(Copyright 1962 by the University of the South. Reprinted with
the permission of the editor); Margaret L. Shook and Smith

xiii
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AlumtUJe Quarterly for No. 43; Dave Smith for No. 76; Spectator for
Nos 7, 56, and 78; Stand for No. so; Richard Tillinghast for No. 29;
Time for No. 67 (Copyright 1975 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission); Times Newspapers Ltd for Nos 11, 18,
21, 34, 54, and 71 from the Times Literary Supplement and No. 23
from The Times; Anne Tyler for No. 6s; University of Nebraska
Press for No. ss. from Prairie Schooner (Copyright © 1973
University ofNebraska Press); Washington Post for No. 39; Women's
Studies (Gordon & Breach Science Publishers) for No. 44·
It has proved difficult in some cases to locate the owners of
copyright material. However, all possible care has been taken to
trace ownership of the selections included and to make full
acknowledgment for their use.

xiv
 Introduction

Few modern or contemporary writers have had the quantity of

criticism dedicated to their writing that Sylvia Plath's work has
received. Generally positive, that criticism has fluctuated widely,
depending on when it was written. In the early 1960s, when her
first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, and her novel,
The Bell Jar, appeared, most criticism was highly encouraging.
Critics recognized a sure new voice, speaking in tightly wrought
patterns and conveying a definite sense of control. The more
traditional critics responded to Plath's work with enthusiasm. Plath
was obviously a well-educated, disciplined writer who usually
avoided the sentimentalities of some female writers. She wrote tidy
poems, reminiscent of those by Richard Eberhart, Karl Shapiro,
Randall Jarrell, and Richard Wilbur. She wrote fiction-at least
part of The Bell Jar-with a wry voice somewhat like that of]. D.
Salinger. In retrospect, that same taut humor was evident in many
of the poems from The Colossus.
The Bell Jar was published on I4, January I963, under the
pseudonym of 'Victoria Lucas.' No one knew it was Sylvia Plath's
work; it stood on its own completely unknown feet-yet it was
favorably reviewed. On I I February I96J, Plath committed
suicide, and the second stage of criticism of her work began
immediately. Within a week eulogies and laments appeared that, of
necessity, changed the tenor of reader response for years to come.
For a young woman to kill herself at the beginning of a successful
writing career posed an intriguing-and frightening-mystery. All
kinds of equations between art and life began to be suggested. Had
Plath written so personally that she had somehow crossed the
boundary between art and life? Was full exploration of the creative
process dangerous? Why would a woman with two small children
choose to leave not only her successful practice of her art but also
those dependents? Controversy was rampant, and criticism of
Plath's work would never again be untouched by biography.
 INTRODUCTION

THE COLOSSUS AND OTHER POEMS

When Heinemann published The Colossus and Other Poems in

London, in late fall of 1960, very near Plath's twenty-eighth
birthday, the collection was well received. The first half-dozen
reviews were almost entirely positive. Peter Dickinson's comment
in Punch set the tone. He called the book 'a real find ... exhilarating
to read.' Dickinson commented on Plath's being an American but
said that she was 'different.' (In an adjoining review of Richard
Eberhart's Collected Poems, Dickinson mentioned that the older
poet's work was 'hard going ... in the American manner' and
equated a high proportion of abstractions with that national style.)
He saw Plath's strength as her ability to avoid the abstract, to
arrange concrete experience in 'clean, easy verse.'
Bernard Bergonzi's tactic in his Manchester Guardian review (No.
6) was similar. He began by discussing generally the work of
women poets and then pointed out that Plath's poetry differed
from that body of writing because of its 'outstanding technical
accomplishment,' its 'virtuoso' quality. He identified Plath's
influences as Theodore Roethke and John Crowe Ransom, but
claimed that neither her poems nor her vision was derivative, and
that she wrote with a rare degree of assurance. John Wain, in the
Spectator (No. 7), agreed that Plath already had an individual
manner and voice. He enjoyed what he called her 'clever, vivacious
poetry' and humor. Roy Fuller, however, in the London Magazine
(No. 9), objected to the fact that Plath was twenty-eight rather than
twenty-three. For her age, he thought she was too dependent on
voices other than her own 'controlled and rather ventriloquial' one.
Even this review, however, was largely positive. 1
The most accurate of the early comments on The Colossus and
Other Poems appeared in the Observer for 18 December 196o (No.
8). A. Alvarez described Plath's work as 'good poetry,' regardless
of her nationality, gender, or age, and pointed out how
concentrated-and how mysterious-some of her work was.
Alvarez saw Plath's reluctance to express herself directly as a 'sense
of threat, as though she were continually menaced by something
she could see only out of the corners of her eyes' as the distinction
of her work. According to Alvarez, at Plath's best, 'her tense and
twisted language preserves her and she ends with something

2
 INTRODUCTION

ominous, odd, like one of the original tales from Grimm. ' 2 Plath
clearly was a presence on the London poetry scene.
As reviewers recognized, The Colossus and Other Poems was a
strong book. Nearly all the poems in it had already been published
in leading American and British journals. The book had, in one
form or another, several times been the runner-up in the
prestigious Yale ·Younger Poets book competition. (The winning
manuscript in the competition was published as a book in the Yale
series of that name.) Plath was hardly unknown. During the
previous ten years she had published in Harper's, Atlantic Monthly,
the Christian Science Monitor, the London Magazine, the Kenyon
Review, Chelsea, the Critical Quarterly, the Antioch Review, Made-
moiselle, Seventeen, the Listener, Encounter, the New Statesman, the
Observer, the Nation, the Spectator, the Sewanee Review, Poetry,
Granta, the Hudson Review, the Partisan Review, and the Times
Literary Supplement. She had a 'first-reading' contract with the New
Yorker, which meant that that magazine was sent all new writing
and had first right of either acceptance or rejection. Somewhat like
Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, the first book Stevens published
although he had been writing poetry for many years, Plath's The
Colossus included the core of her poetic aesthetic and a good many
poems that would remain seminal.
In April of 1962, The Colossus was published in the United States
by Alfred A. Knopf. In agreeing to publish the book, Knopf had
asked that Plath shorten the collection by ten poems, and that the
closing sequence, 'Poem for a Birthday,' be omitted because of its
resemblance to Theodore Roethke's work. Plath agreed, but
then replaced two of the seven parts of the latter poem, 'Flute
Notes from a Reedy Pond' and 'The Stones,' to close the American
text.
American reviewers seemed somewhat less excited about the
book than British readers, thinking that Plath's derivative qualities
were more noticeable than her originality. William Dickey objected
to what he called her narrow range of tone, as did Reed
Whittemore, who opened his comments by identifying Plath as
'Mrs. Ted Hughes.' E. Lucas Myers' review (No. 12) stressed the
impersonal nature of Plath's poems, even though they appeared to
be about personal subjects. He praised Plath for her technical skill
and suggested that her next collection would be even more

3
 INTRODUCTION

rewarding if she could get rid of that sense of objectivity that kept
readers from feeling that the poems mattered. M. L. Rosenthal
recalled later that the American reviews recognized Plath's promise
but thought her academic: 'her work seemed "craft"-centered and a
bit derivative.' (No. 35)3

PLATH'S BIOGRAPHY

All her life, Sylvia Plath had known she wanted to become either an
artist or a writer. The older child of well-educated Boston parents,
Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath, Sylvia collected a number of
academic awards during her childhood and adolescence. An
English major at Smith College, she won all the major prizes for
writing and scholarship, but she was also very much an American
woman of the 1950s. She was plagued with the notion that she had
to marry and have children, as well as having a career. Some of
these conflicts over her life direction (career vs. marriage, sexual
experience vs. chastity) combined with a strain of depression in her
father's family to cause a breakdown in the summer of 1953,
shortly after she had come home from a month on the Mademoiselle
College Board in New York. The out-patient electroconvulsive
shock treatments she received probably led to her suicide attempt in
late August, and she spent the next six months under psychiatric
care before returning to Smith College. InJune 1955, she graduated
summa cum laude and then studied for an MA on a Fulbright
fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge.
On 16 June 1956, she married the British poet Ted Hughes. She
completed her work at Newnham and then in 1957 she and Hughes
returned to the United States and Plath taught freshman English for
a year at Smith. She and Hughes then lived for another year in
Boston, establishing themselves as professional writers. Sylvia
studied briefly with Robert Lowell; she and Ted spent the fall of
1959 at Yaddo. Late in 1959 they returned to England and lived for
more than a year in London. In the next three years, Plath bore two
children, published The Colossus and Other Poems, established a
home in an ancient Devon house, separated from Hughes, and was
living with her children in a flat in Yeats' house in London when
she committed suicide, just a few weeks after The Bell Jar was
published in England.
4
 INTRODUCTION

THE BELL JAR

Published under a pseudonym, The BellJar was greeted as the work

of a female Salinger. Reviewers were struck with parallels in tone
with The Catcher in the Rye. Robert Taubman preferred The Bell Jar
to James Jones' The Thin Red Line and John Updike's Pigeon
Feathers, calling it 'an intensely interesting first novel' and terming
Lucas 'astonishingly skillful.' Laurence Lerner (No. 19) made no
comparisons and, seemingly, had no reservations. He called it 'a
brilliant and moving book' which triumphed in both language and
characterization. Similarly, the unnamed reviewer for the Times
Literary Supplement (No. 18) praised Lucas (Plath) for her skill in
creating a different world, particularly with so keen a wit. The
review concluded that the novel is 'a considerable achievement.'
For Rupert Butler, The Bell Jar was 'intensely interesting,' 'brave,'
'astonishingly skillful,' 'honest,' and 'terribly likeable. ' 4
Later reviewers knew that Sylvia Plath had written The Bell Jar,
so in commenting on the novel, they discussed both her suicide and
her poems. When the novel was reissued in England under Plath's
name, and finally appeared in 1971 in the United States, it was
usually reviewed as being inferior to Plath's late poems. In his 1966
editorial in Critical Quarterly (No. 37) for example, C. B. Cox
praised the novel as an 'extremely disturbing narrative' that made
'compulsive reading.' He then compared The Bell Jar with Plath's
late poetry and concluded, 'The novel seems a first attempt to
express mental states which eventually found a more appropriate
form in the poetry. But throughout there is a notable honesty' and
'something of that fierce clarity so terrifying in the great poems of
Ariel. ' 5 Even though The Bell Jar came to take a secondary place to
Plath's poetry, it was responsible for much of her reputation,
especially her international reputation. Prose translates more easily
than does poetry, and a readership existed for Plath's novel that
only much later came to her poems. Thematically, The Bell Jar was
accessible to women readers the world over.
There were good late reviews of the novel as well. M. L.
Rosenthal, writing in the Spectator, spoke of the book's 'magni-
ficant sections whose candour and revealed suffering will haunt
anyone's memory.' He then introduced a theme which became a
touchstone for criticism of Plath's work, that of cultural
alienation-and the resulting frustration-of talented women.
s
 INTRODUCTION

Rosenthal spoke of 'the sense of having been judged and found

wanting for no externally discernible reason, and the equally
terrifying sense of great power gone to waste or turned against
oneself. ' 6 Patricia Meyer Spacks took that direction in her 1972
Hudson Review essay when she called The Bell Jar a good survey of
the limited possibilities for women:

the sensibility expressed is not dismissible. The experience of the book is

that of electrocution .... Female sexuality is the center of horror: babies in
glass jars, women bleeding in childbirth, Esther herself thrown in the mud
by a sadist, hemorrhaging after her single sexual experience. To be a
woman is to bleed and bum.... Womenhood is entrapment, escaped from
previously by artistic activity, escaped from surely only by death. 7

Lucy Rosenthal, writing in the Saturday Review, compared The

Bell Jar to Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays but pointed out that 'the
Plath mode is gentler.' She praised the novel as 'a deceptively
modest, uncommonly fine piece of work ... in its own right a
considerable achievement. It is written to a small scale, but
flawlessly-an artistically uncompromising, witty account.' Juxta-
posed to these reviews came Melvin Maddocks' caustic note that he
found an abrupt break between the first half of the book ('Bobbsey
Twins on Madison Avenue, gradually being disenchanted') and the
second half, 'less a contrast than a discontinuity.' Martha Duffy,
however, said in Time that the novel was an American best-seller
because of its 'astonishing immediacy.' Simultaneous with the
American reviews in the early 1970s came Tony Tanner's opinion
in his City of Words, American Fiction 1950-1970 (1971) that The Bell
Jar was 'perhaps the most compelling and controlled account of a
mental breakdown to have appeared in American fiction.' He also
called it 'a very distinguished American novel. ' 8

ARIEL

While criticism of The Bell Jar has continued to be positive, and

while it may be the work by Plath that is most read, most critics
and reviewers today think of her as primarily a poet. The reviews
of her major collection, Ariel, the book edited by Hughes and
published in 1965, two years after her death, marked the beginning
of her present critical reputation.
6
 INTRODUCTION

John Malcolm Brinnin, reviewing the American edition of Ariel,

said that Plath was
a marvel .... what we have here is not, as some bewildered critics have
claimed, the death rattle of a sick girl, but the defiantly fulfilling measures
of a poet.... If Sylvia Plath's performance were not so securely
knowledgeable, so cannily devised, so richly inventive and so meticulously
reined, it would be intolerable. Many of these poems are magnificent. 9

Samuel F. Morse, too, in Contemporary Literature called Ariel 'an

absolute achievement' and Derek Parker, in the British Poetry
Review, said, 'Criticism is disarmed, finally, by these poems ...
remarkable poems ... immensely varied in tone.' Parker described
Plath's ability to celebrate 'life and her children, in some tender,
loving and laughing poems' and noted that 'one has the impression
of a control so complete and natural that it never inhibits. ' 10 Praise
came even from comparatively staid reviewers. Richard Tillinghast
(No. 29) called Ariel 'the most interesting new poetic development
of recent years. . . . here nothing is wasted, everything is a
diamond.' He was pleased with 'the intensity, the economy, the
emphasis on originality, the ability to combine seemingly unrelated
things and to separate the expected combinations' 11 -again, with
Plath's craft as poet.
Yet-for all the attention to craft-there was already a strong
strain of biography in criticism of Plath's work. Ariel was difficult
to separate from the events ofher life because so many of its poems
seemed to speak about those events, and its production had been a
part of them. At the time ofher suicide, Plath had left a manuscript
by the title of Ariel ready for publication.* Unfortunately
Hughes-who was her literary executor because she died
intestate-chose to omit a number of the poems Plath had chosen
for the book (among those omitted 'The Detective,' 'The Jailer,'
'Purdah,' 'The Rabbit Catcher,' 'The Courage of Shutting-Up,' 'A
Secret,' and others). The collection, however, contained many
powerful later poems-'Daddy,' 'Lady Lazarus,' 'Ariel,' 'Elm,'
'The Applicant,' and the sequence of bee poems.

* Compiled in mid-November 1962, the collection earlier was titled The Rival, The
Rabbit Catcher, A Birthday Present, and Daddy. Each of these titles focused on the
separation, the failed marriage and possible reasons for it. In changing the focus to
the spirit of Ariel, Plath was leaving some of her personal history behind, and
emphasizing the power of art to transform life.

7
 INTRODUCTION

In Hughes' role as editor, he also changed the arrangement Plath

had planned for the book. Her conception of Ariel was that it
would be an affirmation. In keeping with the spirit Ariel from
Shakespeare's The Tempest, who was freed from imprisonment in a
tree because of his potential for good, the book Plath titled Ariel
would suggest a coming to freedom for its equally androgynous
poet persona. It would open with the beautiful 'Morning Song' and
its first word would be 'Love.' It would close with the powerful
five-poem bee sequence, making the poem 'Wintering' the last in
the collection. The closing word, in that case, would have been
'Spring.'
The positioning of the bee sequence was important because that
group of poems (reminiscent of Plath's 'Poem for a Birthday'
sequence, which closed The Colossus and Other Poems in its British
edition) is a masterful summation of the diverse emotional strands
in her late poems-suspicion, sorrow, anger, vengeance, pride,
love, self-confidence, andjoy. In the group of the bee poems, the
themes of self-knowledge and self-possession dominate. The
endurance and wisdom of the tattered old queen bee become the
speaker's ideal.
The bee poems also suggest Otto Plath, Sylvia's father, who was
an entomologist who specialized in bees. She had written about her
relationship with him (and his death when she was only eight} in
'The Colossus,' 'The Bee Keeper's Daughter,' 'Electra on the
Azalea Path,' 'Full Fathom Five,' and 'Daddy,' many of her best
poems. She also brought the father-daughter relationship to mind
in her allusions to The Tempest, where the primary story is that of
Prospero, the deposed duke of Milan, and his loving daughter
Miranda. In contrast to The Tempest, in Plath's poems the absence
of a protective father is a haunting theme.
For whatever reasons, the affirmative progression that Plath had
planned for Ariel was destroyed in the somewhat random order
Hughes gave the book. The emphases that accrued naturally from
the placement of key poems, their images or themes repeated in
other poems, no longer existed. Had the collection been published
as Plath had intended, praise for it would have been even louder.
The importance of Ariel in the Plath canon cannot be over-
emphasized. Even though she had been a professional writer for
over a decade, she had written very little that pleased her as much as
the Ariel poems did. After a dozen years of being a poet, a time
8
 INTRODUCTION

during which she read voraciously and knew well the works of a
number of poets and novelists (chief among them Dylan Thomas,
Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Theodore Roethke, William
Butler Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Shakespeare, John Donne,
D. H. Lawrence, William Blake, W. H. Auden, Anne Sexton,
Stevie Smith, and many other contemporary poets), Plath knew
her craft. She had written poems in every stanza form and every
rhyme pattern available; she knew what was possible in her art.
After finishing her two years of study at Cambridge, living in the
United States, and then returning to England during the I959-60
winter, she began developing her own style in poetry as well as in
prose. Writing The Bell Jar during the spring of 196I may have
helped her find the voice that was right for her poetry-somewhat
cynical, sorrowful, wry, but also incisive and truthful. At times it
was a voice of raucous, not very ladylike, humor. Many of the
poems that Plath wrote during I96I and early I962, including the
long radio play Three Women, spoke with this voice. It had
occurred only intermittently earlier in her career: 'Poem for a
Birthday' had some touches of it, as did 'The Colossus' and
'Mushrooms.' By the fall of I962, when Plath and Hughes had
decided to separate, she found in her poems a means of expressing
her emotions while yet creating expert and moving poems.
Plath's so-called 'October poems' number twenty-five. They
include the entire bee sequence as well as 'Daddy,' 'Lady Lazarus,'
'The Detective,' 'Purdah,' 'Fever IOJ 0 , ' 'The Applicant,' and
others. Because she was troubled by insomnia and woke up early in
the morning, Plath wrote most of these poems (which she called
her dawn poems) between 4 and 7 a.m., when the children awoke.
The consistent excellence of Plath's fall poems derived, of course,
not from their being written early in the day, or in a single month,
or after marital problems; but rather from her ability to create a
poetic voice that could express the wide range of emotions she was
struggling with. During the fall of I962, Plath's life experience and
art experience coalesced, and the results were poems uniquely her
own. No one else had ever written poems that told such depressing
narratives in macabre yet jaunty comedy. She called such poems as
'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' 'light verse.' The cinematic progres-
sion from image to image, the use of unexpected rhymes, the
defiant tone had little antecedent in any poetry, and might have
been closer to the early plays of Arthur Kopit than to any poems
9
 INTRODUCTION

Plath knew. A devotee of Beckett, Camus, and Ionesco, Plath had

borrowed the elliptical gallows humor of their prose and drama
for her poems during what she thought of as her own 'absurd'
autumn.
In mid-November of 1962 Plath arranged the manuscript she
called Ariel. She wrote other poems during December, January,
and early February, as she closed down the Devon house and
moved her family into their new flat-the upper two floors of
Yeats' house-in London. Those very late poems were poignant,
sad, and mercilessly controlled. The anger which had flamed so
brilliantly in the October poems had changed into a meditative
austerity, almost impersonal in tone. Although' Plath had been
planning a new collection for these late poems, Hughes published a
dozen of them in Ariel. The resulting mixture of styles and themes
kept some readers from seeing the consistent development of
Plath's poetry.*

THE PLATH LEGEND

So great was the critical response to the publication of Ariel,

however, when it appeared in England in 1965 and in the United
States in 1966, that a virtual Plath legend developed. It began with
Alvarez's review of Ariel along with Robert Lowell's collection,
For the Union Dead (No. 20), and his use of the term 'extremist art'
to describe a poetry in which the poet's perceptions are pushed to
the edge of breakdown. Alvarez credited Lowell with the creation
of such a poetry, and saw Ariel as heavily influenced by Lowell's
earlier poems. He spoke of Plath's poems as 'nearly all ... about
dying,' a somewhat misleading description, and included accounts
of her 'extraordinary outburst of creative energy in the months
before her death' which led to the intense last poems. According to
Alvarez, Plath's art left her no direction except death. As he wrote,
'when her death finally came it was prepared for and, in some
degree, understood. However wanton it seemed, it was also, in a
way, inevitable, even justified, like some final unwritten poem. ' 12

* That achievement is, however, clear for the first time in the dating and arranging
of Plath's work as she intended it, now available in The Collected Poems (New York:
Harper & Row, 1981).

10
 INTRODUCTION

Even before the publication of Ariel, there had been much notice
of Plath's last poems, published separately and in groups as they
were soon after her death. In I964, Critical Quarterly published an
essay by C. B. Cox and A. R. Jones which announced Plath and
James Baldwin as the writers to influence the future. In 'After the
Tranquilized Fifties, Notes on Sylvia Plath and James Baldwin,'
they created the paradigm that Plath and Baldwin were mirroring
the violent chaos that life in the I96os was, much as Eliot's The
Waste Land had echoed his culture in the I920s. The authors had
only praise for Plath's work, and singled out her poem 'Daddy' to
illustrate the way her poetry went beyond
the expression of a personal and despairing grief. The poem is committed
to the view that this ethos oflove/brutality is the dominant historical ethos
of the last thirty years. The tortured mind of the heroine reflects the
tortured mind of our age. The heroine carefully associates herself and her
suffering with historical events. For instance, she identifies herself with the
Jews and the atrocities of 'Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen' and her persecutors
with Fascism and the cult of violence. The poem is more than a personal
statement for, by extending itself through historical images, it defines the
age as schizophrenic, torn between brutality and a love which in the end
can only manifest itself, today, in images of violence. This love, tormented
and perverse, is essentially life-denying: the only escape is into the
purifying freedom of death.
Controversy raged: A. E. Dyson had called attention to the essay
and the issues in a two-page editorial that opened the number, and
several letters from important critics appeared, challenging the
assumptions, in a subsequent issue of Critical Quarterly. Plath's
work, even before its appearance in Ariel, was of interest,
compelling interest, in the world of British letters. 13
Alvarez was not the only critic who reviewed the Robert Lowell
and Sylvia Plath collections in tandem. Many readers reached the
same conclusions, and used the term 'confessional' to describe the
work. The comparison was encouraged because when Plath's Ariel
was published in the United States the following year, I966, it
included a Foreword written by Lowell himself. He described
Plath's poems as 'personal, confessional, felt,' although he also
qualified his praise of her by saying that her tone was one of
'controlled hallucination' and was therefore impersonal. Lowell
clearly understood the audacity of Plath's late technique. He
admired the Ariel poems and wrote, 'These poems are playing
II
 INTRODUCTION

Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder. ' 14 In this

comment, too, the implication is that the practice of such an art can
be fatal.
Coupling Plath and Lowell (and W. D. Snodgrass, John
Berryman, and Anne Sexton) into a 'confessional' school of poetry
was a critical event of the mid-1960s that had far-reaching
repercussions. M. L. Rosenthal used the term in his 1967 book, The
New Poets, including Theodore Roethke and Allen Ginsberg in that
category. The term was attacked as being imprecise and inaccurate,
but it had currency for the next twenty years. Because confessional
poets were said to write about the extremes of human behavior,
many of them having experienced mental breakdown, and because
several of these poets were women, the term 'confessional' became
pejorative. It signalled the end of control, the opposite of craft. The
use of the term also fed into a current of resistance that surfaced
when the Lowell foreword to Ariel was published: that of women
readers and critics who objected to the somewhat patronizing tone
of the established male poet praising Plath by setting her apart from
other women writers. Lowell had written that, in her amazing
production, 'Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something
imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created-hardly a person at
all, or a woman, certainly not another "poetess."' (Erica Jong's
poem 'Bitter Pills for the Dark Ladies,' which quotes Lowell's line,
is an aptly famous answer to his undermining statement.)
The battle over what confessional poetry is or was, and how
influential it is or was to more contemporary poetry, did not hinge
entirely on the merits of Sylvia Plath's work. Her reputation
developed as an integral part of this larger issue, however, and the
focus in discussing Plath's work remained, for the next decade, on
those personal elements in her art that so intrigued many of her
readers. A. Alvarez's 1971 book, The Savage God, A Study in
Suicide, acted as a catalyst to prompt even more attention to the
personal elements in Plath's art. Published despite objections from
the Hughes family, Alvarez's book presented an erstwhile biogra-
phy ofPlath as the driven writer, whose brilliance derived from her
psychological daring in testing the known limits of a person's
involvement in creativity. (Parts of this book had appeared in the
special Plath issue of Tri-Quarterly, edited by Charles Newman and
published in 1966. It was later reissued in book form by Indiana

12
 INTRODUCTION

University Press in 1970. This special issue gave much credence to

the art of Plath, including many fine essays, worksheets from
unpublished poems, and some ofPlath's drawings.) For despite the
sensational kinds of attention Plath had received since the publica-
tion of Ariel in the mid-sixties, there was also a strong and steady
current of critical essays appearing in a variety of academic and
poetry publications.

CROSSING THE WATER AND WINTER TREES

In 1971 Hughes published a second posthumous collection of

Plath's late poems. Crossing the Water was frequently reviewed in
light of the Alvarez study; to a certain extent, the third posthumous
collection, Winter Trees, published a year later, also shared that fate.
Critics seemed caught between trying to balance the invidious
image of Plath the suicidal, destructive, and destroying woman
with that of Plath as artist, mother, and friend.
Helen Vendler, for example, in a New York Times Book Review
essay on Crossing the Water, denies that Plath is 'schizophrenic,'
claiming that 'her sense of being several people at once never here
goes beyond what everyone must at some time feel.' She also deals
with Plath as 'confessional,' stating that the poet is never out of
control. Rather,
an undeniable intellect allegorizes the issues before they are allowed
expression. Even in the famous 'Daddy,' the elaborate scheme of
Prussian-and-Jew has been constructed to contain the feelings of victimiza-
tion, and the decade-by-decade deaths in 'Lady Lazarus' are as neat a form
of incremental repetition as any metaphysical poet could have wanted. 15

With the perspicuity of hindsight, Robin Skelton finds the poems

in Crossing the Water 'perturbing' for their evidence of 'neurotic
self-absorption.' Such sophistry as Plath evinces leads to flawed
structures, Skelton finds, and so 'dangerous distortions' of philoso-
phy. He admits that Plath writes a 'poetry of extreme verbal
brilliance,' using 'imagery that is more vital and surprising than
that of any other poet of her generation .... Crossing the Water goes
some way towards beginning to justify the high reputation her
work has already been given. ' 16

13
 INTRODUCTION

Both Victor Kramer and Linda Ray Pratt (Nos 53 and 55) stress
the 'transitional' nature of the poems in this collection, a label more
misleading-now that Plath's poems have been arranged in The
Collected Poems according to her dating of them-than was guessed
at the time. In reviews of both Crossing the Water and Winter Trees,
critics attempted to sort out patterns, and pieces, of the Plath
career. Joyce Carol Oates, for example, notes that 'it is evident that
the bulk of Winter Trees does not constitute so finished a work as
Ariel or The Colossus (No. 57). Nevertheless,' Oates continues, 'the
volume is fascinating in its preoccupation with formlessness, with
dissolving, with a kind of premature posthumous disappearance of
the poet's personality.' Both Oates and Raymond Smith (No. 59)
stress the importance of the radio play Three Women, partly as a
major coherent piece and partly for its subject matter, the
consciousness of three women in a maternity ward. Oates closes
her brief review with the affirmation that Plath's poems maintain
their 'existential authority': 'it seems incontestable to me that her
poems, line by line, image by image, are brilliant. ' 17
James Finn Cotter, writing in America about the neglect of most
women poets (No. 6o), notices Plath's 'spiritual dimension' in
poems such as 'Mystic,' 'Brasilia,' and 'Winter Trees.' He finds her
'a reflexive poet,' searching for answers that are not cliches. What
negative criticism exists of these latter collections builds on the
premise of Plath as demonic poet, as when Roger Scruton (No. 56)
remarks that, 'In the later poetry we find no attempt to say
anything. Images enter these later poems as particulars only,
without symbolic significance, and however much the poet may
borrow the emotional charge from distant and surprising
sources ... it is never with any hint of an intellectual aim. ' 18
Soon after the publication of Crossing the Water and Winter Trees,
the cry that had been comparatively small in the late 1960s for the
full publication of Plath's work grew larger. One of the most
articulate voices was that of Eric Hornberger who, in an important
New Statesman essay (No. 62), gave details of the profitability of the
limited editions of unpublished Plath poems, and called for a
complete collected poems at once. 'Sylvia Plath means big
business. Ninety thousand copies of the American edition of The
Bell jar were sold by Harper & Row at $6.95; the paperback edition
sold one million copies between April andJuly of this year [1972];
and it was chosen by the Literary Guild. ' 19
14
 INTRODUCTION

LETTERS HOME

If criticism of Plath's later poems during the early I970s could be

characterized as having a sense of dutifulness-critics having to
take one side or the other of the discourse about this controversial
poet-the response that greeted Letters Home by Sylvia Plath,
Correspondence 1950-1963, selected and edited with commentary by
the poet's mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (I975) was revitalized by
firm convictions. Critics maligned Plath's mother for her role as
editor (omissions, presenting the poet as a sugary daughter who
never lost her temper, trying to disguise the psychological
problems that must have been apparent). In fact, critics seemed to
disbelieve the Plath persona as it appeared in these hundreds of
letters written from Smith College and the subsequent locations in
England; and were ready to blame their own disbelief on any likely
explanation. Jo Brans' remarks (No. 66) are typical of many of the
reviews: 'we can learn very little of the Sylvia of the poetry, the
only Sylvia in whom we can take a legitimate interest, from these
letters,' 'the most consistent tone of the letters is bright insincerity,
indicated by all kinds of giveaways to anyone conscious of style.'
Brans also criticized Mrs Plath for her editing, although it later
became clear that there were some passages that the Hugheses
would not permit to be reprinted. 20
Other reviews were more solicitous of Aurelia Plath. Martha
Duffy wrote with sympathy of the life of this sacrificing mother,
and even attributed Plath's suicide to her distance from Mrs Plath
(No. 67). Marjorie Perloff also defends the mother figure in The
Bell jar, saying, 'It will not do to think of Aurelia Plath as the "Mrs.
Greenwood" of The Bell Jar, that hopeless Polly-anna-Mother.'
Perloff makes some striking points in her review, among them that
Plath 'seems to be on an eternal treadmill: she must excel, she must
be popular, she must decide .... ' Perlofrs conclusion, after reading
the 4oo-odd letters of the book, is that 'Sylvia Plath had, in
Laingian terms, no sense of identity at all.' That, for Perloff, is the
reason Letters Home traces 'the American Dream Gone Sour,' the
bright, promising person, aimed at ostensible success, who fails in
the most visible, futile way possible. 21
The publication of these letters seemed to clarify many of the
lines of argument about Plath and the Plath persona in the poems,
even while reviewers were arguing about 'the real Plath.' Subse-
I5
 INTRODUCTION

quent books of criticism and essays made use of the letters; and the
relative merits of studies by Mary Lynn Broe, Jon Rosenblatt, and
Lynda Bundtzen (published in 1980, 1979, and 1983, respectively),
when compared with those by Eileen Aird (1973), Edward
Butscher (1976), and David Holbrook (1976), seem to bear out the
sense that something valuable was implicit in the process of reading
Plath's letters. 22

PLATH AS WOMAN WRITER

One of the most important directions Plath criticism took after the
publication of Letters Home in the mid-seventies was toward
defining and assessing Plath as a woman writer. Such treatment
gave new prominence to work such as Three Women, the bee
sequence, and the poems about children. Given impetus by critics
such as Ellen Moers, Suzanne Juhasz, Patricia Meyer Spacks, Elaine
Showalter, Tillie Olsen, Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, the
study of writing by women began to assume intelligible patterns.
Gilbert and Gubar's phrase, 'the anxiety of authorship,' spoke to
the difficulties women had in finding their roles as writers; Suzanne
Juhasz's 'double-bind situation' suggested the mixture of aggres-
sion and passivity women writers must encompass. Carol Christ
noted, 'The simple act of telling a woman's story from a woman's
point of view is a revolutionary act.' When Hughes says, writing
about Plath's late work, 'A real self, as we all know, is a rare thing.
The direct speech of a real self is rarer still ... , ' 23 his praise is greater
than he knows. For a woman writer to come to such validity is the
rarest achievement of all.
Rather than emphasizing the angers Plath expressed late in her
life, the best of this feminist criticism attempts to piece together the
reasons for her angers, her skillful manipulation of art forms that
could be useful to her in her newly discovered voice, and the
resulting impact her art evoked on modem-day readers. To
categorize her as another Richard Brautigan, immersed in the
definition (or denial) of the power of death, misses the mark; as
does the notion that Ernst Becker's theories of anomie rise from the
holocaust of war-riddled life. Arthur Oberg, in his own post-
humously published study of the contemporary lyric, described

16
 INTRODUCTION

Plath as 'perhaps a poet who lived and wrote almost before what
might have been her time. ' 24 There is an exciting sense of this~of a
mystery not yet solved-in recent criticism on Plath's work and,
perhaps more importantly, on studies of those readers who have
found Plath on their own. Plath's work speaks to an audience that
has mushroomed on its own, that has not been instructed in
academic classrooms to read Plath (if anything, her work has been
treated like that of Allen Ginsberg, as something to shy away
from). We have yet to discover the multiple roots of its seemingly
great appeal.
Valuable is Anne Cluysenaar's study of Plath as

a typical 'survivor' in the psychiatric sense. Her work shows many traits
which are recognized as marking the psychology of those who have, in
some bodily or psychic sense, survived an experience of death ... extreme
vulnerability to danger. As an element in this complex of emotions,
imagining death has a life-enhancing function. It is an assertion of power,
over death but also (less attractive but psychologically authentic) over
other human beings.

Cluysenaar concludes, 'That is the crux of her message-the

retention of discrimination and the will to speak, the will to
communicate. Her determination not to accept relief from any
ready-made dogma is admirable. ' 25 This broader appeal may
account for the ready acceptance of Plath in feminine circles
as well.

JOHNNY PANIC AND THE BIBLE OF DREAMS

This collection of short stories, prose, and journal excerpts was

published in 1977 in Britain and two years later in the United
States. Again edited by Hughes, the material provided the first
short fiction available to readers. It was, however, generally
criticized as being apprentice work. Lorna Sage (No. 7I) com-
mented on Plath's being 'surprisingly inept at inventing structures,
even ordinary plots, taking refuge instead in archaic, would-be
wry, 0. Henry "twists" to rescue directionless narratives.' William
Dowie remarks about the 'remarkable control which is almost too
tense.' Even though Douglas Hill (No. 70) finds the best of the

I7
 INTRODUCTION

work here as 'indelibly distinctive' as the poems, most reviews

expressed disappointment. 26 It was left to Margaret Atwood,
writing in the New York Times Book Review, to note that Plath had
tried for many years to be a commercial fiction writer: 'To this end
she slogged away in the utmost self-doubt and agony, composing
more than 70 stories.' Atwood also points out, accurately, how
incredibly hard Plath worked at her writing.

On one level 'Johnny Panic' is the record of an apprenticeship. It should

bury forever the romantic notion of genius blossoming forth like flowers.
Few writers of major stature can have worked so hard, for so long, with so
little visible result. The breakthrough, when it came, had been laboriously
earned many times over. '1:7

THE COLLECTED POEMS

Published in 1981, after almost a decade of promises that such a

volume would soon appear, Plath's Collected Poems were edited and
arranged by Ted Hughes. The volume was an immediate critical
and commercial success; reviews were almost uniformly positive,
and the book surprisingly won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982
(an award seldom given posthumously). The 274 poems in the
volume show why Plath changed the direction of contemporary
poetry. They prove repeatedly that a versatile structure-the poet's
ability to reflect mood in every nuance of the poem, from image to
single line to patterns of sound repetition-is more important than
any prescriptive technique. And they show with even more
surprising consistency how successful Plath was in shifting those
structures, molding tone and pace and language to reflect the poem
in its unique form-both tragic and comic. Called by a wide range
of distinguished reviewers 'the most important collected volume of
the last twenty years,' 'a triumph of hard work and artifice,' and
'the most important book of poetry this year,' The Collected Poems
showed dearly that Plath was, indeed, 'one of the most remarkable
poets of her time.' As Katha Pollitt concluded, 'by the time she
came to write her last seventy or eighty poems, there was no other
voice like hers on earth. ' 28
Several of the reviews echoed William H. Pritchard's New
Republic comment, entitled, ironically, 'An Interesting Minor
18
 INTRODUCTION

Poet?' (No. 75). Pritchard acknowledges that his earlier assessment

of Plath's work-until the publication of this collection-had been
an endorsement of Irving Howe's 'interesting but minor' categor-
ization. He now considers Plath truly central, 'an altogether larger
and more satisfying poet' than he had thought previously: a poet to
be studied and learned from, poem by poem. 29
Just as Pritchard stresses the lessons to be learned from the
poems, so Laurence Lerner (No. 74) sees Plath's work as a
continuum. He points out that poems in The Colossus might well
have been included in Ariel (discounting the sense of rigid
separation most critics believed existed between the two collec-
tions), and that many of the Ariel poems are not the best-known
pieces, but rather poems that 'stand back a little,' that work
through
greater formality ... half-rhymes and regular stanzas .... It undercuts at
least one popular view of Sylvia Plath, that her early work is controlled,
formal, even superficial, and the later poems make true contact with her
anxieties, and so are imbued with a new power. There is some truth in this,
but it should not be taken too rigidly.

Michael Hulse (No. 78) repeats this injunction, that The Collected
Poems 'is a corrective to many myths and misunderstandings.' For
Dave Smith (No. 76), writing in American Poetry Review, Plath's
collection is a 'cranky, beautiful, maudlin, neurotic, soaring
book ... the record of a life.' 'The Collected Poems is that
shimmering change, a gothic fairy tale with the properties of dry
ice: it keeps, it burns, it lives.' And beyond Smith's exuberant
praise for the poems, when he deals with the issue of Plath's
suicide, he says, accurately,
Poetry became Sylvia Plath's life. It did not kill her except where it failed
her .... Poetry kept Sylvia Plath alive; her poems are ectoplasmic with the
will to live, to be as right as poetry can be, to be unequivocally, seriously,
perfectly the voice of the poem as magical as a heartbeat. That is a burden
no poet can bear forever, and it surprises any poet who bears it at all. 30

The widespread surprise at the excellence of this volume-the

ability it had to penetrate the cliches about Plath's poetry by
presenting readers with nearly 300 poems of varied and expert
authority-was followed the next year by the publication, again in
the United States, of her journals.
19
 INTRODUCTION

THEJOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH

In the spring of 1982, just a few weeks before Plath's Collected

Poems won the Pulitzer Prize, the excerpted Journals were pub-
lished. Many reviews of this book also mention the Pulitzer,
conveying to the readers the sense of wasted promise that her
journals in themselves also evinced.
For Marni Jackson (No. So), the journals express Plath's
vulnerability: not only is the writer's love of the world here, but so is the
fearful 'sos woman driven to be everything to everyone . . . . She
managed ... but in her own mind she was always falling short. Her private
writing is one long ache of self-recrimination.
Jackson points out, too, the bursts of 'radiant well-being,' Plath's
thirst for life and experience. As Nancy Milford notes in her
review, however, full self-expression as a woman is at odds with
being someone's wife, and Plath's journal charts long years of her
understanding that dilemma. As Milford describes the pervasive
themes: 'the twin thrusts of sex and vocation, which are,
unfortunately for her, linked to idealized domesticity and female
dependence.' In the words of Le Anne Schreiber, Plath's 'pagan
relish for life' was all but subsumed in her fears that her 'true deep
voice' will never be allowed to speak. Schreiber finds that
late-poem voice intermittently in the journal entries, and writes,
The irony is that the voice she was looking for ... is present in these diaries
from the beginning. In a raw state, to be sure. And only fitfully. But while
she was looking to D. H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke
and, of course, Mr. Hughes, and practicing a kind of ventriloquism that
made her doubt her talent and even her existence, her own voice was
pouring itself out in these journals. 31
In reviewing the journals, too, several critics stress the appren-
ticeship Plath served as writer, and Walter Clemons finds that
emphasis one of the most important of the book.
The revelation of how unremittingly she works makes this a book I
recommend to any aspiring writer, particularly to a novice who thinks of
Plath as a special case-a star clothed in the glamour of suicide ... the
journals help us appreciate the protracted, hard-working apprenticeship
that led to her final blazing utterance. 32
While it is unfair to assess the hundreds of critical reviews and
20
 INTRODUCTION

essays, not to mention numerous books, as 'transitional,' tentative,

revealing only the impression Plath's work evoked at certain times
in the past thirty years, still the body of criticism that now exists
does have that flavor. There is a tone of hesitancy about even the
surest pronouncements; there is still some mystery about the Plath
oeuvre. And rightly. Her journals of the last three years of her life
are not available. Several collections of materials are housed in the
Smith Library Plath collection, sealed until either the year 20I3 or
the years of the deaths ofboth her mother and her younger brother.
Plath's last novel, titled Double Exposure, has never been found,
though I 30 pages of it-at least-were known to exist at the time
of her death. One cannot be sure that all the poems have been
published, although there is no immediate reason to believe that
they have not been included in The Collected Poems. There is good
reason, consequently, to feel that the materials Plath wrote are yet
incomplete, and that a full and just assessment of her work would
be impossible at the present time.

NOTES

I Peter Dickinson, 'Some Poets,' Punch, 239 (7 December 19(So), p. 829;

Bernard Bergonzi, 'The Ransom Note,' Manchester Guardian (25
November I !}(So), p. 9; John Wain, 'Farewell to the World,' Spectator,
2o6 (13 January 1961), p. so; and Roy Fuller, review, London Magazine,
8 (March 1961), pp. 69-70.
2 A. Alvarez, 'The Poet and the Poetess,' Observer (18 December I !}(So),
p. 12.
3 William Dickey, 'Responsibilities,' Kenyon Review, 24 (Autumn 1962),
pp. 756-64; Reed Whittemore, 'The Colossus and Other Poems,' Carleton
Miscellany, 3 (Fall 1962), p. 89; E. Lucas Myers, 'The Tranquilized
Fifties,' Sewanee Review, 70 Oanuary-March 1962), pp. 212-20; M. L.
Rosenthal, 'Metamorphosis of a Book,' Spectator, 218 (21 April 1967),
pp. 456-7.
4 Robert Taubman, 'Anti-heroes,' New Statesman, 6s (2sJanuary 1963),
pp. 127-8; Laurence Lerner, 'New Novels,' Listener, 69 (31 January
1963), p. 21 s; 'Under the Skin,' Times Literary Supplement (25 January
1963), p. 53; Rupert Butler, 'New American Fiction: Three Dis-
appointing Novels-But One Good One,' Time and Tide, 44 (31
January 1963), p. 34·
s C. B. Cox, 'Editorial,' Critical Quarterly, 8 (Autumn 1966), p. I9S·
21
 INTRODUCTION

6 M. L. Rosenthal, 'Blood and Plunder,' Spectator, 2I7 (30 September

I966), p. 4I8.
7 Patricia Meyer Spacks, 'A Chronicle of Women,' Hudson Review, 25
(Spring I972), pp. I57-70.
8 Lucy Rosenthal, 'The Bell jar,' Saturday Review, 54 (24 April I97I), p.
42; Melvin Maddocks, 'A Vacuum Abhorred,' Christian Science Monitor
(IS April I97I), p. II; Martha Duffy, 'Lady Lazarus,' Time, 97 (2I June
I97I), pp. K7-K9; Tony Tanner, City of Words, American Fiction
1951-1970 (London: Jonathan Cape, I97I).
9 John Malcolm Brinnin, 'Plath, Jarrell, Kinnell, Smith,' Partisan Review,
34 (Winter I967), pp. IS6-6o.
IO Samuel F. Morse, 'Poetry I966,' Contemporary Literature, 9 (Winter
1968), pp. II2-29; Derek Parker, 'Ariel, Indeed,' Poetry Review, 56
(Summer 1965), pp. I I8-20.
II Richard Tillinghast, 'Worlds of Their Own,' Southern Review, s
(Spring I969), pp. 582-96.
12 A. Alvarez, 'Poetry in Extremis,' Observer (14 March I96S). p. 26.
I3 C. B. Cox and A. R. Jones, 'After the Tranquilized Fifties,' Critical
Quarterly, 6 (Summer 1964), pp. I07-22; A. E. Dyson, 'Editorial,'
Critical Quarterly, 6 (Summer I964), pp. 99-100. Critical Quarterly, 7
(Autumn 1964), pp. 276-7.
I4 Robert Lowell, 'Foreword' to Sylvia Plath's Ariel (New York: Harper
& Row, I966), pp. vii-ix.
IS Helen Vendler, 'Crossing the Water,' New York Times Book Review (Io
October 197I), pp. 4, 48.
I6 Robin Skelton, 'Poetry,' Malahat Review, 20 (October I97I), pp.
137-8.
I7 For the best assessment of the misdating ofPlath's poems, see Marjorie
Perloff, 'On the Road to Ariel: The "Transitional" Poetry of Sylvia
Plath,' Iowa Review, 4 (Spring I973), pp. 94- I IO. Victor Kramer,
'Life-and-Death Dialectics,' Modern Poetry Studies, 3 (1972), pp. 40-2;
Linda Ray Pratt, "'The Spirit of Blackness is in Us ... , "' Prairie
Schooner, 67 (Spring I973), pp. 87-90; Raymond. Smith, 'Late
Harvest,' Modern Poetry Studies, 3 (I972), pp. 9I-3;Joyce Carol Oates,
'Winter Trees,' Library Journal, 97 (I November 1972), p. 3595·
I8 James Finn Cotter, 'Women Poets: Malign Neglect?' America, 128 (I7
February I973), p. I40; Roger Scruton, 'Sylvia Plath and the Savage
God,' Spectator, 227 (I8 December I97I), p. 890.
I9 Eric Hornberger, 'The Uncollected Plath,' New Statesman (22 Septem-
ber I972), pp. 404- S·
20 Jo Br;ans, "'The Girl Who Wanted to be God,"' Southwest Review, 6I
(Summer 1976), p. 325.
21 Martha Duffy, 'Two Lives,' Time, 1o6 (24 November 1975), pp.

22
 INTRODUCTION

101-2; Marjorie Perloff, 'Review of Letters Home,' Resources for

American Literary Study, 7 (Spring 1977), pp. 77-85.
22 Jon Rosenblatt, Sylvia Plath, The Poetry of Initiation (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Mary Lynn Broe, Protean
Poetic, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1980); and Linda Bundtzen, Plath's Incarnations, Woman and the
Creative Process (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983).
Other useful books are Nancy Hunter Steiner, A Closer Look at Ariel: A
Memory of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, I973);
Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (New
York: Harper & Row, 1976); two bibliographies, Thomas P. Walsh
and Cameron Northouse, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference
Guide (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1974) and Gary Lane and Maria
Stevens, Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
1978); and five collections of essays, that from 1970 edited by Charles
Newman; another from 1977 edited by Edward Butscher (Sylvia Plath,
The Woman and the Work, New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co.); from 1979,
Gary Lane, ed., Sylvia Plath, New Views on the Poetry (Baltimore, Md.:
Johns Hopkins University Press); in 1984, Critical Essays on Sylvia
Plath, ed. Linda W. Wagner (Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall), and Ariel
Ascending, Writings about Sylvia Plath, ed. Paul Alexander (New York:
Harper & Row, 1984).
23 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979) and their introduction to
Shakespeare's Sisters, Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1979); Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms,
Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition (New York: Harper
Colophon, 1976); Carol Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing, Women
Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1980); Elaine
Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1977); Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Delacorte
Press/Seymour Laurence, 1978); Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female
Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975); and Ellen Moers,
Literary Women (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976). Ted
Hughes' comment appears in the 'Foreword' to The Journals of Sylvia
Plath, 1950-1962, ed. Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes (New
York: Dial Press, 1982), p. xii.
24 Arthur Oberg, Modem American Lyric-Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and
Plath (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), p. 177.
25 Anne Cluysenaar, 'Post-culture: Pre-culture?' in British Poetry Since
1960: A Critical Survey, ed. Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop
(Oxford, England: Carcanet Press, 1972), pp. 219-21.
26 Lorna Sage, 'Death and Marriage,' Times Literary Supplement (21

23
 INTRODUCTION

October I977), p. 1235; William Dowie, 'A Season of Alarums and

Excursions: ':Johnny Panic and the Bible ofDreams,"' America, I40 (3
March I979), p. I6S; Douglas Hill, 'Living and Dying,' Canadian
Forum, s8 Oune I978), pp. 323-4·
27 Margaret Atwood, 'Poet's Prose,' New York Times Book Review (28
January I979), pp. IO, 31.
28 Michael Hulse, 'Formal Bleeding,' Spectator, 247 (I4 November I98I),
p. 2o;John Bayley, 'Games with Death and Co.,' New Statesman, I02 (2
October I98I), p. I9; Laurence Lerner, 'Sylvia Plath,' Encounter, s8
Oanuary I982), p. 53; Katha Pollitt, 'A Note of Triumph,' Nation, 234
{I6 January I982), p. S4·
29 William H. Pritchard, 'An Interesting Minor Poet?' New Republic, I8S
(30 December I98I), pp. 32-s.
30 Dave Smith, 'Sylvia Plath, The Electric Horse,' from 'Some Recent
American Poetry: Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,' American
Poetry Review, I I Oanuary I982), p. 46.
3I MarniJackson, 'In Search of the Shape Within,' Maclean's Magazine, 95
(17 May 1982), p. 57; Nancy Milford, 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath,'
New York Times Book Review (2 May I982), pp. 30-2; Le Anne
Schreiber, 'The Journals of Sylvia Plath,' New York Times (21 April
1982).
32 Walter Clemons, 'A Poet's Rage for Perfection,' Newsweek, 99 (3 May
1982), p. 77·

24
 Abbreviations

CP The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, New York and London,

1981
] The Journals of Sylvia Plath, New York, 1982
LH Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Correspondence, 1950-1963, ed.
Aurelia Schober Plath, New York and London, 1975

25
 Note on the Text

Save for some silent corrections, texts are printed verbatim.

Deletions are marked by the use of ellipsis or indicated with square
brackets. Original notes are numbered 1, 2, 3 etc. Editorial notes
are indicated with asterisks.
References
For relatively complete listings, see the Lane and Stevens bibliography, the Wagner-Martin biography, and the Lane collection of essays.
The quantity of material has now grown to such proportions that a new bibliography is needed, and is being compiled by Sheryl Meyering.