Sylvia Plath, The Poet and her Writing Life

Abstract

The temptation to do little but re-create Plath’s biography through readings of her work — and, implicitly, to try to unearth the complex reasons for her tragic suicide — overtakes the most focused reader. What happens as one studies Plath’s oeuvre is that the vivid humanness of her narrated experience becomes overpowering. Too often, the mere establishment of intellectual boundaries, some means of separating the work from what appears to be the story told in it, proves ineffectual. For Sylvia Plath to be valued as the magisterial poet she was, readers must accept a number of her writerly principles as guides for their absorption of her work.