Back when America was careening from the Eisenhower era—the “tranquillized Fifties,” as Robert Lowell called them—toward the Age of Aquarius, American poetry was undergoing a dramatic shift as well. A period of highly controlled, formal, and impersonal poetry, dominated by the likes of Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, gave way with surprising rapidity to one of unrestrained, exceedingly personal free verse, often about extreme emotional states, by such poets as John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass. So revolutionary did these effusions seem at the time that the critic M. L. Rosenthal found it necessary, in a review of Lowell's 1959 volume Life Studies, to coin a new name for them: confessional poetry. To be sure, although the confessionalists tended to be more explicit about their divorces, orgasms, and such than poets of earlier generations, there was nothing fundamentally new about verse that took the poet's private life and feelings for its material; accordingly, though Rosenthal's term gained widespread currency, there were from the beginning those who objected to it as unnecessary and even denigrating, and who maintained that to label a poem in this fashion was to draw inordinate attention to its often sensational subject matter and thereby to slight its literary merit.

Of course, the literary merit of confessional poetry varied widely; and perhaps the most unfortunate effect of the term's broad acceptance was that, in the years after Life Studies, many a poet and critic began thinking of confessionalism as something that aspired not to aesthetic excellence so much as to the total honesty of the psychiatrist's couch or—well—the church confessional, and that should therefore be judged by the degree not of its artistry but of its candor. What was lost sight of, by many, was that for such poetry to be of literary importance it must, through a concentration not on universals but on intimate particulars, awaken in all sorts of readers (whose lives might, needless to say, be extremely different from the poet's in those intimate particulars) a sense of common humanity, a mature recognition that the essentials of one life are the essentials of all. If bad confessional poetry, in other words, appeals to a reader superficially, soliciting his attention and empathy on the basis of shared background or politics or neuroses or sexual tastes—or, alternatively, taking him out of himself in much the same way as a lurid, gossipy supermarket tabloid—the best confessional poetry introduces him to individuals with whose social lives and ideas he might not identify at all, but whose personal testimony nonetheless manages somehow to draw him inward. Like the poetry of Wilbur and Hecht, moreover, the best confessional poetry is marked by balance, control, a sense of form and rhythm, and even a degree of detachment.

Though, of all the confessional poets, Robert Lowell earned the most substantial literary reputation, it was Sylvia Plath who, in the years following the posthumous publication of her second poetry collection, Ariel (1965), became the movement's chief icon. Yet while Lowell's fame needs no more explanation than the aesthetic merit of his work, Plath's quick rise to near-legendary status owes much to other factors. For one thing, Plath's notion of herself as a victim of two domineering men—her father, who died when she was a child, and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, from whom she was separated at the time of her suicide in London in 1963—made her extremely useful to the women's movement. (Perhaps no one has more memorably expressed the feminist position on Plath than Robin Morgan, who in a poem entitled “Arraignment” accuses Hughes of Plath's murder and envisions a group of women entering his home, “disarm[ing] him of that weapon with which he tortured us, / stuff[ing] it into his mouth, sew[ing] up his poetasting lips around it, / and blow[ing] out his brains.”) Meanwhile, Plath's proudly flaunted self-destructiveness, and her romantic image of herself as a sensitive genius in a brutal and indifferent world, made her a natural idol for many a young person in the throes of adolescent torment. (What, after all, could be more irresistible to a saturnine, self-romanticizing teenager than a passage like this, from Plath's college journal: “nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future, which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.”) I think it is safe to say that these two groups account for the majority of Plath's devotees and that neither group cherishes her work chiefly for its literary merit.

For such readers, patently, the real interest lies not in Plath's art but in her life. And her life—from her childhood in Jamaica Plain, Winthrop, and Wellesley, Massachusetts, through her undergraduate career at Smith and two Fulbright years at Cambridge, to marriage, motherhood in Devon and London, the beginnings of literary prominence, marital estrangement, and self-slaughter at thirty—is fascinating, though not on the superficial level that such readers tend to focus upon. It is fascinating, rather, as a study in the nexus among art, ambition, and abnormal psychology, and, more specifically, in the formation of an author whose most anguished poems, composed only weeks before her suicide, are widely considered to be the quintessence of confessional poetry. The story of this formation must begin with Plath's parents, Otto Emil Plath, an authoritarian, German-born entomology professor, and his submissive wife, Aurelia, a second-generation Austrian-American. Both parents shared a belief in discipline, a disinclination to make (or to allow their children to make) close friends, and—in the words of Anne Stevenson, author of the biography Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989)—a “veneration for work”; together, they raised an obedient, overachieving daughter who found security (or, at least, a semblance thereof) in the structures and schedules of the classroom and whose sense of self-definition appears to have depended from an early age upon her ability not only to meet but to exceed the expectations of her parents and teachers. Otto's death when Sylvia was eight years old (she insisted, the next day, on going to school) led to a lifetime of largely suppressed rage at him, both for being a tyrant—which he may or may not have been, depending upon how one defines the word—and for abandoning her, and led also to a lifetime of tireless effort to surpass the goals set for her by the authority figures she erected in his place.

To be sure, as long as she was a student, Sylvia functioned splendidly—or seemed to. At twenty, invoking an image that later provided the title for her autobiographical novel, she would write to a friend that “I've gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell-jar, all according to schedule, four college years neatly quartered out in seasons.” But the daughter of Otto Plath needed that bell-jar, needed the structure provided by school and college, needed her mother and teachers to set goals for her. If, as she admitted, she suffered from a “terrifying fear of mediocrity,” it was because anything less than first-rate work might shatter her fragile sense of self; and if, furthermore, she referred to a college boyfriend as her “major man,” one suspects that it was because she was unable to understand anything in life—whether it was dating, marriage, or the making of a literary career—except by analogy with schoolwork, choosing friends as if they were honors courses and competing for beaux as if they were class prizes.

Peter Davison, who met Plath when she was a star undergraduate at Smith, wrote later that she was “always trying to create an effect, to make an impression,” and that she talked about her own life “as though she were describing a stranger to herself, a highly trained circus horse.” Which, in a way, she was: for she would jump through almost any hoop to please those in authority. The vapid prototypes established by others formed the foundation of her identity: she embraced the role of All-Around Coed, for instance, with an inane fervor astonishing in one so intelligent (“I still can't believe I'm a SMITH GIRL!” she wrote her mother soon after entering college). She would stop at little to win academic distinction: friends complained of her manipulativeness, of how she used people to get ahead and discarded them callously when they were no longer needed.

Even in literature, image ruled. Plath writes her mother about course possibilities at Smith: “Imagine saying, ‘Oh, yes, I studied writing under Auden!’ … Honestly, Mum, I could just cry with happiness.” If many a bard before and since has longed to forge the uncreated conscience of his race, Plath, in journal entries about her poetic aspirations, takes the tone of a high-school climber angling for a graduation medal, noting that “I must get philosophy in [i.e., into her poetry]. Until I do so I shall lag behind A[drienne] C[ecile] R[ich].” Her willingness to bow to both literary and subliterary totems is exemplified by her habit (as noted by Stevenson) “of talking of Wallace Stevens in one breath and Mademoiselle in the next.” Just as she deliberately wrote insipid stories at Smith to win approval from the editors of Seventeen, in later years she was equally desperate for the approbation of The New Yorker, whose first acceptance of a Plath poem occasioned an almost frighteningly rhapsodic journal entry.

Writing was always important to Plath. Her father had been an author—of, among other things, a textbook on bumblebees—and had used the family supper table as a writing desk. Stevenson, who has a sensitivity to the motives behind Plath's writing that seems to have eluded earlier biographers, highlights a memory of Mrs. Plath's. During Sylvia's early childhood, at times when her mother was attending to Sylvia's infant brother, Warren, and wanted to prevent her daughter from trying to draw attention away from the boy, she encouraged the little girl to read letters in newspapers. Stevenson's savvy comment: “even at two and a half her daughter was being urged to treat negative emotion (jealousy of her brother) with words.” This was something that Plath would do throughout her life. For her, writing became a way of asserting herself, of combating her deficient sense of identity. “Haunted by a fear of her own disintegration,” Stevenson notes, Plath “kept herself together by defining herself, writing constantly about herself, so that everyone could see her there, fighting and conquering an outside world that forever threatened her frail being.” No wonder, then, that, as Edward Butscher observes in his 1976 biography Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, “getting published was not merely important [for Sylvia], it was everything”: for her, seeing one's name in print was the ultimate proof not merely of acceptance but of existence.

The literary life, however, proved to differ so drastically from life at home, school, and college that Sylvia's first excursion from familiar territory into the terra incognita of publishing was almost her last. During the summer of 1953, she went to New York as an undergraduate editorial intern for Mademoiselle—an experience that exposed her for the first time to a chaotic, equivocal adult world in which the first thing authority figures demanded of her was simply that she be herself. And being herself, alas, was one thing that Sylvia was not good at. Butscher quotes Plath's editor at Mademoiselle as saying that she had “never found anyone so unspontaneous so consistently. … [Sylvia was] all façade, too polite, too well-brought-up and well-disciplined.” In any event, removed from the closed system of accomplishment and approval within which she had operated for so long, Plath became unstrung. Soon after returning home, she attempted suicide, and spent the next several months undergoing psychiatric treatment at McLean Hospital, which over the years would gain fame as the treatment center of choice for Plath's fellow confessionalists Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. (The whole experience, of course, is retold in fictional form in her 1963 novel The Bell Jar.)

What is one to make of this suicide attempt? Though they differ considerably in tone and emphasis, the interpretations of Plath's biographers are not as inconsistent as one might expect. Butcher's centers on the notion that Sylvia

was three persons, three Sylvias in constant struggle with one another for domination: Sylvia the modest, bright, dutiful, hard-working, terribly efficient child of middle-class parents and strict Calvinist values who was grateful for the smallest favor; Sylvia the poet, the golden girl on campus who was destined for great things in the arts and glittered when she walked and talked; and Sylvia the bitch goddess, aching to go on a rampage of destruction against all those who possessed what she did not and who made her cater to their whims.

To complicate matters, Butscher speaks of additional, if secondary-level, Sylvias, whom he describes as “fitful shadows of the three main configurations.” One was “Sylvia the sad little girl still hurting from the profound wound of her father's rejection and abandonment of her and wanting to crawl back into her mother's cave-safe womb”; another was “Sylvia the ordinary teenager who yearned for a kind husband, children, and a house like her grandmother's by the seashore.”

Stevenson, for her part, settles for two Sylvias—a false outer self and a real inner self—and argues that the poet's self-destructiveness sprang from the yearning of her real self to kill her false self “so that her real one might burn free of it.” This picture seems much simpler than Butscher's, but Stevenson also chooses to complicate things a bit by maintaining that

Sylvia had long been confusing two very different battles within herself. One was with an artificial Sylvia, modeled on her mother, driven by ambitions she believed Aurelia harbored for her and ideas she thought Aurelia projected. This battle was occurring on a comparatively superficial level. Beneath it, so to speak, raged an altogether more serious war, where the “real” Sylvia—violent, subversive, moon-struck, terribly angry—fought for her existence against a nice, bright, gifted American girl. This “real” self may have been created, and gone underground, at the time of her father's death in November 1940. It had emerged in August 1953, before her suicide attempt, and it remained in charge during the months of her slow recovery at McLean. It would be too simple to say that the nice girl wanted to live while the vengeful, deserted daughter wanted to die. But it was probably the case that Sylvia's powerful buried self was deadly in its determination to emerge at any cost.

To a considerable extent, of course, there is no need to choose between Butscher's and Stevenson's formulations: they are largely two ways of looking at the same thing. Stevenson's ‘“real’ self,” for instance, despite the drastic difference in tone, is essentially equivalent to Butscher's “bitch goddess.”

At McLean, Plath underwent shock treatments and was told by her doctor that it was all right (a) to hate her parents and (b) to have sex. She claimed to have found all this liberating, and returned to Smith supposedly cured. (Certainly her success-oriented approach to literature returned, strong as ever. “Must get out SNAKE PIT,” she confided to her journal in 1959, referring to Mary Jane Ward's bestseller. “There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.”) But Butscher and Stevenson both believe that McLean did her more harm than good. Butscher's view is that Plath's doctor “resurrected the mask [i.e., her good-girl façade] and gave it a firmer fit by letting Sylvia participate in the unearthing of the classic Electra complex.” Stevenson focuses her attack not on the psychoanalysis but on the shock treatments, arguing that they critically weakened Plath's façade (which she, unlike Butscher, sees as protective and necessary). “It may be that she never really recovered” from the shock treatments, writes Stevenson, suggesting that they

changed her personality permanently, stripping her of a psychological “skin” she could ill afford to lose. Attributable to her ECT is the unseen menace that haunts nearly everything she wrote, her conviction that the world, however benign in appearance, conceals dangerous animosity, directed particularly toward herself. Sylvia's psychotherapy almost certainly opened up the dimensions of her Freudian psychodrama, revealing the figure of her lost, “drowned” father … whose death she could neither forgive nor allow herself to forget; psychotherapy also intensified the presence of her much-loved yet ultimately resented mother, whose double she had to be, for reasons of guilt or ego weakness, and to whom she was tied by a psychic umbilicus too nourishing to sever.

Though the “Freudian psychodrama” is at the center of both interpretations, Butscher places more emphasis on Otto Plath, stating on his first page that Sylvia's “central obsession from the beginning to the end of her life and career was her father,” and interpreting that life in terms of a “frustrated will to power.” Stevenson, by contrast, insists that “[i]t is not clear how much of Sylvia Plath's existential anxiety can be traced to her social isolation as a girl and how much to her father's death.” But it seems to me that both factors are important: if Plath hadn't been sequestered from other children, her father might not have been such a god to her and his death might therefore not have affected her so catastrophically.

Though their interpretations can be seen as largely consistent in their essentials, Plath's biographers differ dramatically in style, method, and perspective. Butscher's book is a mixed—and rather overstuffed—bag. Though he offers a number of perceptive observations and sensitive close readings, he includes countless extraneous details (providing, among much else, the dates on which the Bradford High School honor roll was released). As he demonstrated in his recent biography of Conrad Aiken, moreover, Butscher has an inordinate faith in the ultimate power of psychiatric nomenclature to illuminate anything and everything in the realm of human behavior; to his mind, one gathers, understanding an individual is almost entirely a matter of attaching labels like “neurotic” and “schizophrenic” to that individual's behavior. Butscher assigns these labels with an alarming alarcity and a well-nigh palpable relish, and, quite often, on what would appear to be the slightest of evidence. (A sentence about the mother of one of Plath's boyfriends begins: “Sylvia's dislike of Mrs. Willard, which she of course repressed. …” And: “Sylvia's attitude toward Davison himself remained distant, perhaps because of repressed guilt.”) One comes away from Butscher's book thinking that there should be a psychological label to describe someone overly devoted to psychological labels. Linda Wagner-Martin, in Sylvia Plath: A Biography (1987), has the opposite problem: she performs too little analysis, whether literary or psychological. She treats Plath's suicidal depression almost as if it were a phenomenon unrelated to the poet's day-to-day psychology, and occasionally leaves the impression that she considers Plath to have been, most of the time, as sound of mind as anyone else—at least, that is, until Ted Hughes entered the picture in February 1956, barely more than two years after her suicide attempt.

It was Plath, then an exchange student in Cambridge, who engineered their meeting: one day she read some of his poems in a magazine—poems as intense and dark as she wanted hers to be, and real in a way hers were not—and decided immediately that she had to meet him. That same night, she introduced herself to him at a party, where (as she wrote in her journal) the tall, brooding, Lawrentian young Yorkshireman “kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair-band. … And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face.” And so they were married. Hughes was the first man Plath had ever known to whom she could imagine subordinating herself without difficulty—as both poet and woman—in the way that her mother had subordinated herself to her father. Months later, she would write that Hughes “fills somehow that huge, sad hole I felt in having no father”; for the meantime, however, in letters divulging her new love to her kith and kin, Plath described him as “a violent Adam,” “the only man in the world who is my match,” “the strongest man in the world … with a voice like the thunder of God,” “a breaker of things and of people.” What more could a girl want?

It was after her marriage to Hughes that Plath began to write the poems that eventually appeared in her first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960). In their intellectual and stylistic sophistication, they represent a significant advance over the unremarkable verse of earlier years (fifty examples of which are relegated to the appendix of her 1981 Collected Poems). Like their predecessors, however, all but a few of these Colossus poems read like descriptive exercises—and with good reason, for many of them were exercises, written to order for Hughes, who when Plath could not come up with anything to write about, would arbitrarily select some object, animal, or setting that was near at hand and assign her the task of composing a poem about it. Plath did her job competently, employing all the resources about which she had learned during her years of study. The metaphors and similes in these poems are often quite vivid (the cadavers in a dissecting room are “black as burnt turkey”), and her language frequently betrays the influence of some of the major poets of the day, notably Dylan Thomas. (“No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed, / Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watched / My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches, / And the opulent air go studded with seed.”) And an especially important influence is that of the early poems of Hughes himself, whose lean, grave, and austerely symbolic evocations of nature red in tooth and claw were in turn influenced both by his moor country upbringing and by his extensive reading in anthropology. To be sure, many of the harsh natural phenomena Plath observed in Devon and described in the Colossus poems did apparently move her deeply; Hughes, in an essay published after her death, notes that “[h]er reactions to hurts in other people and animals, and even tiny desecrations of plant-life, were extremely violent.”

As a rule, however, Plath's Colossus poems seem more skillful than inspired. They are, as Anne Sexton commented, “all in a cage (and not even her own cage at that).” Though Hughes presumably tried to suggest topics that would tap Plath's profoundest emotions, almost everything in these verses strikes one as forced, from the intensifying adjectives and adverbs to the patterns of alliteration and assonance. Stevenson notes that as a student Plath, copying words from a thesaurus onto flash cards, had built poems “word by word, like novel, intricate structures”; reading the Colossus poems one can almost see her poring over her Roget's. The irony, of course, is that while the bleak, often violent depictions of nature in many of these poems sincerely reflect Plath's own brittle sense of security in a brutal world—and though some of them plainly seek to draw on her complex, powerful emotions about her father's death—almost all of them have a labored quality, a manufactured intensity, their savage images striking one as over-wrought and self-conscious, their ire and loathing coming across as false. Unlike Hughes's poems, moreover, the Colossus poems almost invariably fail to convey a personality, a point of view, let alone a passionate attachment to or understanding of the people, places, and things that they take as their subjects. Time and again, one feels that Plath is attempting to force greater significance upon scenes and situations than they really hold for her—to force it upon them, that is, rather than to discover it within them. While these poems, then, contain vivid images, striking lines, and pleasing configurations of sound, the poems don't work qua poems.

Not until 1960 did Plath begin to write the poems that would appear in Ariel (1965). The contrast with the most typical Colossus verses is remarkable: her new poems are colloquial, muscular, unafraid of repeated words or odd line lengths or the first person singular pronoun. In the best of them, such as “Tulips,” she breathes some life into her descriptive skills, and yokes wit to feeling. The poems that are almost universally acknowledged as her strongest, however, and that more faithfully represent the characteristic style and tone of the book, are those like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” in which, rather than try to turn homely objects and settings into objective correlatives for her emotions, she embraces wholeheartedly the idea of poem as subjective (and often highly surrealistic) effusion. So frequently praised and ubiquitously quoted are these two poems that it almost seems at times as if Plath's entire reputation rests upon them. There is, to be sure, good reason why these two perverse and passionate poems should receive special attention, because nowhere else in her verse does Plath more bluntly address her most fundamental psychological conflicts. In both poems, Otto Plath and Hughes figure prominently, as does Plath's suicide attempt at twenty. The speaker of “Lady Lazarus,” indeed, brags darkly about her prowess at such attempts (“I do it so it feels real”), marvels at her survival of her attempt at age twenty (and of a near-fatal “accident” a decade earlier), and addresses an unnamed tormentor as “Herr Doktor” and “Herr Enemy.” She compares herself to an extermination-camp inmate, suggests that her victory over death makes her a “sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade,” and perceives that victory as securing for her a grotesque vengeance upon the opposite sex: “Beware / Beware. / Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Manifestly, we are meant to understand here that the speaker's experience with men (or with a certain man) was responsible in some way for her suicide attempt, and that her survival of it represents a miraculous triumph over them. “Daddy” draws on the same preoccupations and takes the same tone. Here the speaker refers to her father as a “black shoe” in which she has lived for thirty years and attributes her suicide attempt to a desire to “get back, back, back” to him. Spared death, she “made a model” of her father, a man with “a love of the rack and the screw,” said “I do, I do,” and lived with him for some time; but now she's murdered one man, in some sense, and by so doing has killed both: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.”

These poems, along with the other most ferocious and famous poems in Ariel, flowed from Plath's pen in October and November of 1962, sometimes at the rate of more than one a day, soon after Hughes became involved with one Assia Wevill (who would become his second wife) and separated from Sylvia. Anne Sexton referred to these as “hate poems,” and that they most certainly are, expressing time and again, in very similar terms, the most extreme and blatant of emotions, invariably aimed in the same direction. “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” are the most arresting of Plath's verses, and it is their hate, really, that makes them so—a hate communicated, often quite effectively, by way of natural language and rhythms, manically insistent repetitions and multiple rhymes, and sensational, often surrealistic images, all of which are designed to grab the attention of the most impassive reader. And grab the reader they do—on a first reading, anyway. In fact, this ability to capture the attention of readers—and even, at times, to shock them—helps explain why the Ariel poems, nearly three decades after Plath's death, remain a force to be reckoned with. And yet, what ultimately makes the poems memorable is less the hate that they express, or the blunt language that they employ, or even the inexcusable, hyperbolic metaphors that equate the poet's suffering with that of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, than it is the fact that all these elements combine to convey, with vigor and directness, the extreme emotional state of a highly unbalanced, self-destructive woman.

It might be argued that there is a degree of aesthetic value in such an accomplishment. But the more one reads these poems, the more one realizes that beneath the thoroughly convincing representation of psychological disturbance—behind, that is, Plath's shrill, deranged voice—there is precious little human dimension. It has been argued that the Ariel poems are saved by their irony, but Plath's irony is facile and, moreover, always directed at others—never at the poet herself. She is capable of quipping sardonically, in “Lady Lazarus,” “Do not think I underestimate your great concern”; but it doesn't occur to her, in her utter self-absorption, that her own dearth of concern for others might itself be a worthwhile target for irony. It is hardly an exaggeration, I think, to say that the chief problem with these poems is their constricting, claustrophobic solipsism. Compared to Plath, even Lowell—himself no tower of sanity or selflessness—seems quite actively involved with mankind, what with his numerous Life Studies poems about relatives, fellow poets, Czar Lepke, and the like; alongside Plath, even Berryman, with his often puerile attitude toward romantic relationships, comes off in the The Dream Songs as painting a nuanced, mature picture of love, sex, and marriage, and as providing, in his Henry persona, a model of proper authorial distance.

This is not to say that poems of self-scrutiny, as such, are necessarily bad, but rather to say that in the Ariel poems the self is so engrossed in itself that there appears to be little possibility of enlightenment, of discovery; to read them is to feel that their goal is not self-knowledge but self-display, a morbid absorption in and superficial celebration of the poet's own sensitivity and imagined victimhood. Throughout the poems, the world beyond the poet is seen consistently as despotic, destructive; yet she seems not to realize to what degree she is in fact her own destroyer, her own victim. The biographies of Plath make it clear that these poems are the work of a psychologically complicated and fascinating woman; but the poems themselves are, by comparison to the woman, woefully simple and—after the first reading—progressively less interesting.

In virtually every regard, then—in range of theme and invention, in complexity of feeling and structure, and in sophistication of style and technique—the Ariel poems are less impressive than the best so-called confessional poems of Lowell and Berryman. Certainly they are smaller in vision. Butscher quotes Irving Howe as complaining that “in none of the essays devoted to praising Sylvia Plath have I found a coherent statement as to the nature, let alone the value, of her vision.” Butscher's reply is that “Sylvia did indeed have a vision: it was to plunge into the depths of self, the dark side of the mind's moon, and hope to touch the bottom of degradation and sorrow.” Putting aside for the moment Butscher's mixed metaphor, what can one say about this defense? It can hardly be denied, of course, that the Ariel poems take such a plunge as Butscher describes. But is it correct, really, to say that they evince a “vision,” in the sense that Howe plainly means? Yes, poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” pierce the poet's surface as sharply as a surgeon's knife; but the incisions are narrow, the innards unilluminated, the result (for the reader) not a laying bare of the intricate workings of a self and soul but a raw, lurid exhibition of private agony and blood-letting. To put it a bit differently, the Ariel poems provide a startlingly naked glimpse into the mind of a deeply disturbed woman; but a glimpse, however naked, is not necessarily the same as an insight, nor revelation necessarily the same as art.

Wagner-Martin would have us believe that the Ariel poems were a triumphant apotheosis—the inevitable consequence of Plath's rejection of Hughes's artificial little assignments and of her “com[ing] into her own as a woman”—and that Plath's suicide, which came soon after the completion of the poems, was essentially the result of Hughes's betrayal and withdrawal from her life. There is, however, nothing triumphant about the Ariel poems; far from reflecting a newly proud and independent womanhood, these poems, with their mad, unbridled hostility, plainly express the poet's sudden helplessness at the withdrawal of the protective canopy underneath which she had erected her entire life as wife, mother, and author. In Hughes, Plath had found a father-substitute, and his departure from her life served to release, after decades of suppression, an eight-year-old's exorbitant fear and fury at her father's death. Plath's sudden outpouring of thoroughly unfettered Ariel poems, in other words, represents less a breakthrough than a breakdown; for the poems show little sign of control over or understanding of her rage, let alone mature perception into the human complexities that produced it.

Nor can one blame Plath's suicide on Hughes. Her original attraction to him, after all, had much to do with his status as a “breaker of things and of people”; plainly, the self-destructive part of her had craved such a consort, and if he had never existed, she would have had to invent him. While in some sense, moreover, Hughes may indeed have failed Plath, in her mind the failure was doubtless her own: their marriage was, so to speak, a postgraduate honors course that she could not pass. For just as she had aimed for excellence in school and college, she had also set herself the goal of being an A-plus wife and mother; what she could not accept was that one cannot conduct one's personal life as if they gave prizes for it, any more than one can write serious fiction or poetry while aiming, above all, to please some editor, whether at Mademoiselle or The New Yorker.

If Wagner-Martin renders Plath's marriage as something of a feminist domestic tragedy—with Hughes as the villain—Stevenson seems eager to prove that, in W. S. Merwin's words, “there was something in Sylvia of a cat suspended over water, but it was not Ted who had put her there or kept her there.” The sharp contrast between the views of Wagner-Martin and Stevenson in this matter is reflected in their respective prefaces: whereas Wagner-Martin claims, in her preface, that her unwillingness to alter her manuscript in accordance with demands by Olwyn Hughes (Ted Hughes's sister and Plath's literary executor) led to a denial of permission to quote at length from Plath's works, Stevenson thanks both Ted and Olwyn for all sorts of assistance (and, by the way, quotes extensively from the poems). Stevenson appears to go out of her way to catalogue Plath's offenses, especially against her husband (for instance, her rudeness to his humble Yorkshire mother), and to point out the various ways in which she considers him to have been a positive force in Plath's life. Some of the latter observations—for example, the argument that Hughes made the Ariel poems possible by persuading Plath “to be true to her gift rather than to her ambition”—seem valid. But Stevenson's tone is too often prosecutorial, and sometimes one feels as if she is doing little more than proffering a list of the Hughes camp's long-nursed grievances. Plath's Ariel poems, we are reminded, have caused great pain “to the innocent victims of her pen”; after Plath's separation from Hughes, her frequent reference to her lawyer's instructions “helped to make negotiations … difficult.” To hear Stevenson tell it, Plath was always the one making things “difficult”: time and again, the biographer leaves the impression that Hughes was a perfectly balanced and responsible man dealing as honorably as he could with a demented woman. Perhaps most astonishing of all is Stevenson's implication that the attraction between Hughes and Assia might never have developed into an affair had Plath reacted less hysterically upon noticing it—that, in short, Plath, not Hughes, was responsible for his adultery. All this is most unfortunate, for, such matters aside, Stevenson's is by far the most intelligent and sensitive of the Plath biographies; until Hughes steps onstage, Stevenson's picture of Plath rings truer, on the whole, than anyone else's.

What did the poet herself make of Ariel? It is interesting to note that Plath—presumably sensing that the Ariel poems' crude, superficial confessionalism was a deficiency, while not knowing precisely how to mitigate it in presenting her verses to an audience—described “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” to A. Alvarez as “some light verse.” Likewise, in an apparent attempt to put over the idea that the voice in these poems was not hers but rather that of an imaginary persona, she told an interviewer that “Daddy” had as its speaker a girl whose father was actually a Nazi and whose mother “very possibly [was] part Jewish.” Such addenda, of course, if seriously accepted by a reader, rob a poem like “Daddy” of what force it has, a force that derives precisely from the speaker's mad, unreasoning hate; yet the fact that Plath felt compelled to describe the poem in this fashion suggests that, even though she was incapable of eliminating the poem's weakness, she was astute enough to recognize where that weakness lay. It is only to be hoped that, in the next century, such astuteness in regard to Plath's work will be less rare than it is today among poetry readers, and that future generations will be less inclined to confuse questions of aesthetic significance with those of political serviceability or personal idolatry.