Plath, Sylvia (Vol. 1) - Plath, Sylvia 1932–1963
Plath, Sylvia 1932–1963
An American poet who moved to England, Miss Plath is the author of Ariel and the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. She has become a kind of cult figure since her death. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 19-20.)
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 [the] poems [in Ariel] are magnificent; a whole book of them is top-heavy, teetering on that point where the self-created figure threatens to topple over into self-expression and the diversions of psychopathology….
In Sylvia Plath,… anguish is not a consequence but the whole relentless subject itself. In her vision the primary colors of anguish, the myopic eye of anguish, not only seriously distort the observed world but threaten to obliterate it. The exhibition of an obsession may, for a time, provide a...
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