In the following essay, Broe discusses Plath's poetic vision during the writing of The Colossus.

In the following essay, Ramazani argues that Plath's poems expressing grief fit the criteria of modern elegy and that Plath expanded the genre by adding a tone of abiding anger.

In the following essay, Manners examines similarities regarding images of paternity in the works of Plath and French feminist writer Hélène Cixous.

In the following essay, Materer analyzes the Freudian implications of occultism in Plath's poetry.

In the following essay, Bundtzen examines “Burning the Letters” for its clues to the nature of Plath and Hughes's relationship.

In the following essay, Folsom examines the personal and professional significance of Plath's poem “Berck-Plage.”

In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted traces instances of slang in Plath's poetry.

In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted examines the development of Plath's poetry through analysis of major themes and imagery found in her description of landscapes, seascapes, and the natural world.

In the following essay, Lindberg-Seyersted considers Plath's concerns with clairvoyance and occultism in her life and poetry.

In the following essay, Bawer contends that Plath's extreme popularity as a confessional poet in the 1960s can be attributed more to her reputation as an oppressed and victimized existentialist than to the literary merit of her works.

In the following essay, Strangeways examines Plath's references to the Holocaust in light of her preoccupation with personal history and myth, female victimization, and the specter of nuclear war. Strangeways concludes that Plath does not simply reduce the atrocity of the Holocaust to metaphor, but draws attention to the ambiguous and potentially dangerous interrelationship between "myth, history, and poetry in the post-Holocaust world."

[Hamilton is an English poet, biographer, critic, and editor. His biographies include Robert Lowell: A Biography (1982) and In Search of J. D. Salinger (1988). In the following excerpt, he traces the history of Plath's biographies from her death in 1963 to the present and examines how Hughes's role developed as Plath's reputation grew and changed.]

In the following essay, Dobbs examines allusions to marriage and motherhood in Plath's poetry. According to Dobbs, the hostile and often violent imagery in such pieces reflects Plath's strong resistance to the prospect of domestic entrapment as a wife and mother.

In the following essay, Uroff contrasts Plath's poetic voice with the confessional mode developed by American poet Robert Lowell. Uroff contends that Plath, unlike Lowell, incorporates abstracted autobiographic detail in her poetry only to amplify or dramatize feelings of pain and sorrow rather than to induce actual self-revelation.

In the following essay, Freedman discusses Plath's use of the mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjugation, and Plath's own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life.

In the following essay, Murphy attempts to locate sources for the imagery of violence and destruction in Plath's poetry.

In the following essay, Easthope discusses Plath's place in poetic tradition, particularly as it pertains to Romantic poetry.

In the following essay, Scheerer traces Plath's rejection of mythic paradise—which she evokes using imagery of death—in her poetry.

[In the following essay, Horne details how Plath's published journals were manipulated by Hughes and his editor, thus providing a skewed rendering of Plath's life. Horne concludes that there is always room for interpretation in biography, even when analyzing works written by the subject.]

In the following essay, Aird examines Plath's rapid creative development after the publication of The Colossus. Challenging "the oversimplified and rather sentimental theory" that motherhood inspired Plath's artistic growth during this period, Aird cites Plath's remarkable commitment to her work and the influence of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Theodore Roethke.

[No] poet more than Sylvia Plath keeps reminding us of the terms and the ground of her writing. To say that she writes in extremis is not only an accurate statement of fact but a suggestion that more than aesthetic matters may be involved. (p. 127) Ariel, Sylvia Plath's major posthumously published book of poems, begins and ends in extremis. "Morning Song," the opening poem, begins with the word "love." "Words," the concluding poem, ends on the word "l...

In the following essay, Harris compares Dickinson's response to death with that of poet Sylvia Plath, finding that Plath tends to be more explicit and Dickinson more transcendent in their attitudes.

In the following essay, Annas offers analysis of depersonalization in Plath's poetry which, according to Annas, embodies Plath's response to oppressive modern society and her "dual consciousness of self as both subject and object."

[A nonfiction writer and biographer, Malcolm is well-known for her contributions to The New Yorker. In the following excerpt, first published in The New Yorker in slightly different form in August 1993, she explains the "transgressive nature of biography" and how she became interested in the controversy surrounding the Plath biographies.]

Sylvia Plath's early poetry is both technically and thematically significant, for scattered through the early poems are most of the elements which were later fused into the final, powerful outbursts of the mature poetry. We find in this early work the sense of doom, the fascination with disintegration and death so central to the later poems, though the poet's expressed attitudes are less cogent, less specific in the early poems. We see as well the ambivalence toward sex, wifehood, and motherho...

Sylvia Plath was a romantic of the most self-cancelling kind. She reduced romanticism to a fever, a scream of defiance; but romantic she was, and exactly to the degree that she was alive and struggling. Her romanticism was her wish to live, if at times only in that touchingly qualified transcendence (located on no one's map of earth or heaven) where she could be born once again as her father's little girl. (p. 3) Crushing, nearly Kafkaesque as this father worship was, it is nonetheless moving....

In the following essay, Schultz finds allusions to mythological images of motherhood and womanhood in “Edge.”

In the following essay, Spendal discusses the significance of color symbolism, historical reference, and Plath's use of physical ailment as a metaphor for psychological injury in the poem "Cut."

[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Fels praises the intensity of Malcolm's writing and maintains that it is Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, who is the silent one.]

The reading of [Plath's] work has been entangled in a fascination with her suicide and the broken marriage which preceded it, and such misreading is as widespread among her admirers as among her detractors; she has become for both a convenient symbol. To approach Plath as a poet rather than to use her as an image of a poet one must confront her work in its own terms, which is to say, as literature. In these terms, the fact, for example, that she killed herself is irrelevant to the consideration of th...

[Atlas is an American poet, biographer, and critic. At the time this article was published, he was at work on a biography of Saul Bellow. In the following essay, he discusses the changing nature of biography, contending that current books, including The Silent Woman, tend to revel more in scandalous details than serious scholarship.]

Crossing The Water is an extraordinary book, not promising merely nor dazzling as one might have expected of a poet who was later to write the poems in Ariel, but perfectly satisfying in the way that only major poetry can be. That her achievement here may be spoken of in terms more orthodox than one could legitimately apply to Ariel is but one of the facts the promoters of the legend will have to deal with—how distressing it must be, for some of them at least, to confront a Plath largely in control e...

More successfully than any other recent American poet, Sylvia Plath dramatized those moments of crisis during which the self must choose between life and death. By using intensely personal material, she gave concrete form to an action involving violent self-transformation and initiatory change. Yet it is unfortunate that her poems, which embody a coherent and self-sufficient action, have been understood almost exclusively as confessional documents. (p. 21) Instead of looking at the lyrics in Ariel and Winte...

[In the following review, James describes how Malcolm's investigation into Plath's life was fueled by her sympathy for Ted Hughes and how The Silent Woman presents a revisionist view of Hughes's influence on Plath and her biographers.]

[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Pettingell praises Malcolm's journalistic and self-conscious approach to biography.]

[Glendinning is an English biographer and novelist whose biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer (1977) and Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981). In the following review of Ian Hamilton's Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992), she recounts how biography has changed through the years as those close to an author have sought to control what is said about that person. She also raises questions about the appropriateness of certain details in biog...

In Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general principles, sure origins, applications, or lessons. Her fate and her themes are hardly separate and both are singularly terrible. Her work is brutal, like the smash of a fist; and sometimes it is also mean in its feeling. Literary comparisons are possible, echoes vibrate occasionally, but to whom can she be compared in spirit, in content, in temperam...

[What] Letters Home reveals, is that the various roles Plath assumed—Dutiful Daughter, Bright and Bouncy Smith Girl, Cambridge Intellectual, Adoring Wife and Mother, Efficient Housekeeper—were so deeply entrenched that they determined the course not only of her life but also of her writing. If, as Karl Miller so rightly observes, Plath's letters to her mother were "bent on withholding her 'true' condition," so, the correspondence suggests, were the poems writ...

[Reading Plath's poetry, we] are continually outflanked by someone who knows what we'll approve and how we'll categorize, and is herself ready with the taxonomic words before we can get them out.                Daddy, I have had to kill you.               You died before...

It is fair to say that no group of poems since Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances has had as vivid and disturbing an impact on English critics and readers as has Ariel. Sylvia Plath's last poems have already passed into legend as both representative of our present tone of emotional life and unique in their implacable, harsh brilliance. Those among the young who read new poetry will know 'Daddy', 'Lady Lazarus', and 'Death & Co.' almost by heart, a...

In Plath's poems, the woman speaking is frequently talking to a man about their relationship. This relationship has almost always failed, and the cause of its failure is the women's concern. Those critics who see Plath's women as self-enclosed, narcissistically fascinated with their own torment, gratuitously hateful and enraged beyond any cause, fail to consider this basic situation of the poems. To be sure, the women are voicing their own reaction; but it is a reaction and not an unmot...

[In the following review of The Silent Woman, Kakutani outlines the longstanding libel case against Malcolm for her previous book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), and its relevance to Malcolm's biography of Plath.]

One immediately felt [reading The Colossus] a highly distinctive new voice, and sensibility—something cool, refreshing, healing, like the personality of the poet herself; but something darker, too, at the heart. The title poem is significantly named; a sense of the huge and continuing dominated her sensibility. But the grandeur of nature oppressed, as well as fascinated her: apprehensions of lurking menace, more likely to test endurance than joy, are seldom absent. In 'Hardcastle Crags'...

[I think] that the so called "religious" motifs of [Plath's] "Mystic" have nothing to do with religion or religious spirituality or the supernatural as commonly conceived, but rather with the only variety of religious experience she knew and perhaps believed she ever would know: the "mystical union" of her "great love" and the creative mania that seized her up in the wake of its rupture and left her with a sense of something worse than "t...

[Muske is an American educator, poet, novelist, and critic. In the following review of Linda Wagner-Martin's book Telling Women's Lives (1994), she rejects the author's thesis that women's lives, because of their non-linear nature, do not lend themselves to traditional biography.]

This selection [Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams], made by Ted Hughes, of Sylvia Plath's miscellaneous prose—published stories, articles, a few passages from the notebook-journals—is probably the best that can at present be done to pad out the record…. [The] notes from Cambridge (1956) are the most remote, not just in time. They reek of closet-theatre, and are full of self-disliking yet somehow cosy parentheses—"as I have so often boasted cleverly", �...

Being enclosed—in plaster, in a bell jar, a cellar or a waxhouse—and then being liberated from an enclosure by a maddened or suicidal or "hairy and ugly" avatar of the self is, I would contend, at the heart of the myth that we piece together from Plath's poetry, fiction, and life…. The story told is invariably a story of being trapped, by society or by the self as an agent of society, and then somehow escaping or trying to escape. (p. 592) [In] poem after poem, she ...

[In this brief review of The Silent Woman, Cantwell stresses the elusive nature of biography and the futility of its quest to summarize a person's life.]

That mystery and obfuscation, as well as pregnant misreading, have helped to create a Plath cult is undoubtedly true. That there is a cult-like interest in her life and work (the two often seen as inextricable) can't be denied…. (p. 40) Re-reading all of her published poems, and reading or re-reading a mass of stuff written about her, I've been struck again and again by the dramatic distancing of so much of her work, the way in which she created poems which are precisely not cries from ...

"Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" is a minor work by a major writer…. [It will interest] any reader sympathetic enough to Plath's work to have read most of it already and to be interested in foreshadowings, cross-references, influences and insights…. [It's a prose catch-all] and as such it ought to round out one's knowledge of the writer and, perhaps, offer some surprises. Luckily it does both…. It was a shock akin to seeing the Queen in a bikini ...

[Sylvia Plath's] is a sensibility disturbed, which sees reflected in the exterior world the very tensions, conflicts, and fears that haunt the inner spirit. Her power as a poet derives from her capacity to express this state of mind through the evocation of profound horror. The sense of horror springs from many sources: from her habit of dredging up historical atrocities, from the violent intensity of her expression, from the accuracy and hardness of her language, and most significantly, from the nat...

[Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams] is only of interest if discussing why Sylvia Plath should ever have wanted to write prose—so inferior (The Bell Jar included) is it to her verse—thus this publication must have a purely technical fascination, for even Plath addicts cannot have grown so indiscriminate as to swallow these writings whole…. She thought that fiction, by obliging a writer to create outside himself, would train her to objectivity, and yet in all but a very few of these st...

I hadn't realized until recently … that Sylvia Plath had become something of a heroine of the feminist movement. The myth being, as I understood it, that here was a girl with tremendous literary gifts who married, had two children, and then, hopelessly burdened and appalled by her bleak domestic situation, finally put her head in the oven, turned on the gas, and died…. But though the cause is just, Sylvia Plath is simply no heroine for this or any other movement. Because, alas, that gir...

[While reading Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,] the reader feels as though he is looking at a Sylvia Plath pickled in a laboratory jar…. What we see is not altogether pleasant. Sylvia Plath had an uncommon desire to be a writer…. Her notebook entries reveal her to have been an anxious user of events for the sake of words. Obsessively, she searches for material, for interesting events in life around her; but behind the frantic recording of detail lies a transparent boredom with lifeȂ...

[Plath's early poems] seemed to have no absolute necessity for being: they read like advanced exercises. She wrote a lot of prose as well, including a novel, but none that I have read seemed to me much out of the ordinary. Sylvia Plath's talent, though intensely cultivated, did not bloom into genius until the last months of her life, when, if we may take the internal evidence of the poems in Ariel … as our guide, she stood at the edge of the abyss of existence and looked, steadily, cour...

[Sylvia Plath's] last poems hit the reader with all the passion and pathos of a mind simultaneously fused with love and hate. They are often glorious, mostly sick, unbelievably irritating. They are the like of which have not been seen before, exclusively and tragically her final epitaphs. (p. 552) Grief, a crazy, jig-saw humor, and destructive undertones comprise the basis of the poetry published since her first volume—though some of the features were apparently from the beginning. But the cad...

Crossing the Water consists of poems written in 1960 and 1961, after The Colossus was published but before her final intense period of creation. It's important to stress that they are not Ariel left-overs, but poems of the brief interregnum between her strange precocity and full maturity…. Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book posse...

If, as Robert Frost pointed out, the purpose of any poem is to be different from every other poem, Ariel fails. We read the same poem over and over. The same techniques recur. Subjects are not really examined, explored, reviewed. They become opportunities for the personality to impose itself; they are reviled, distorted, made terrifying. People turn into things; things turn into monsters. After a while one knows exactly how the poet will respond…. Without surprise, poems become dull. The intensity of...

Plath was in many ways a victim of the fifties and its ideology of the family…. Plath, in common with women grappling then with the problems of developing feminist theory, was fighting her way in those poems of the early sixties toward a definition of what life within the middle-class nuclear family does to its members. Her distinctive mediation of the ideology of the family and of love in the fifties and early sixties can tell us a great deal about patriarchal attitudes and how women in general, and...

Sylvia Plath writes clever, vivacious poetry, which will be enjoyed most by intelligent people capable of having fun with poetry and not just being holy about it. Miss Plath writes from phrase to phrase as well as with an eye on the larger architecture of the poem; each line, each sentence, is put together with a good deal of care for the springy rhythm, the arresting image and—most of all, perhaps—the unusual word. This policy ought to produce quaint, over-gnarled writing, but in fact Miss Pl...

[The poems of The Colossus show that] Miss Plath has some of the excusable faults of youth: the attempt to blow up the tiniest personal experience into an event of vast, universal and, preferably, mythic importance; intoxication with the rare word which she displays with nouveau riche ostentation; and obsessive fiddling with certain forms and devices, e.g., terza rima. But with time—the deepening of perception and strengthening of control—these temporary improprieties can become the proper pur...

It is difficult not to think of Ted Hughes (I mean, of course, some of his poems) when reading such an admirable invocation of exuberant, unparagraphed vitality as Sylvia Plath's 'Sow'…. Not that her work is in any sense derivative, but that these two poets often share the same vision. One might criticise the rather baffling obliqueness of some of Miss Plath's work, and the fact that her imagery tends to get out of hand, so that the poem becomes not a single experience but...