In [the poems collected in "Crossing the Water"] written between 1960 and late 1961 and antedating "Ariel," the poet plays Pygmalion to her own Galatea, willing herself into shape, struggling against the inherited outlines of her predecessors…. What exhausting costumes these were, and how heavy, and how distasteful to Sylvia Plath's soul we can only judge from her persistent attempts to shed these skins, and finally, in "Ariel" and some later poems, to transcend them. Meanwhile, here, she rages about in these disguises like some rebellious adolescent dressed by her mother in unsuitable clothes….

Though a poem like ["In Plaster"] seems a textbook illustration of R. D. Laing crossed with Women's Lib, it fails to authenticate Laing, consciousness-raising or itself. To find the genuine Plath, it is not enough to say that she is the ugly and hairy id repressed by the saintlike superego. On the contrary, she is not...