SOURCE: "Plath's 'Ariel': 'Auspicious Gales,'" in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1977, pp. 5-7.

In the following essay, Wagner draws attention to the complexity of Plath's poetry in Ariel which, as the critic notes, invokes archetypal imagery and the paradoxical portrayal of suffering as survival to create depth of feeling and insight.

No poet contemporary with us has been so subject to misreadings, especially biographical misreadings: Sylvia Plath's poems evoke the worst of subjective fallacies. Probably some of our charged reactions are symptomatic of the times and the culture; but more of them seem to stem from the always-too-easy identification between troubled poet (with the ultimate proof, her suicide) and what might be the tone of imagery and rhythm of the poem considered. Because Plath worked so intensively in archetypal imagery (water, air, fire as bases for image patterns, for example), many of her poems could be read as...