The six Sylvia Plath poems in focus here are "Mushrooms," "You're," "The Babysitters," "The Applicant," "Ariel," and "Edge." Sarah Ruden deftly distributes discussions of the poems into a succinct and insightful narrative that marks a breakthrough in an understanding of both Plath's life and career.
After a brisk précis of the poet's life, Ms. Ruden slows down, situating Plath at the Yaddo writer's colony in 1959, upending the traditional view that she ascended to greatness in the final year or so of her life. On the contrary, Ms. Ruden argues, Plath's achievement has to be contextualized into her last three years, when she was finally able to concentrate fully on herself and her work.
Not that Plath thought so. The astute Ms. Ruden does not take Plath at her word; that is, if you read Plath's journals from around the Yaddo period, you might suppose this is a poet struggling to find her voice. She was, but as Ms. Ruden shows her record of accomplishment by the end of 1959 was already extraordinary.
Ms. Ruden does not dwell on Ted Hughes's role in the Plath ascendancy, except to effectively dismiss his contention that only that closing year of his wife's life really counts so far as her poetic achievement is concerned. Too many biographers, with the exception of Heather Clark, whom Ms. Ruden lauds, have adopted the Hughes approach.
One advantage Ms. Ruden has over other Plath biographers, even Heather Clark, is her way of concisely balancing the work and the life, so that both can be weighed on an even scale. Because of her succinct six-poem approach, Ms. Ruden gets away with some technical talk (harder to introduce in conventional biographical narratives), counting syllables and showing how Plath employs the Sapphic stanza.
My only qualm is Ms. Ruden's supposition that Plath might not have meant to really commit suicide, that leaving a note for her doctor is somehow evidence that she wanted to be rescued. This explanation of Plath's final hours has been offered before, but it simply cannot be so. Sticking her head in an oven, at a time when the gas used was more lethal than it is today, meant that Plath would have been brain dead in minutes, and fully gone soon after.
What Plath knew about death by oven gas is not ascertainable, but she clearly chose it as a more effective method than a pill overdose, a method that had been unsuccessful a decade earlier. Ms. Ruden seems to realize how shaky the death by accident explanation is in her interpretation of "Edge."
Ms. Ruden is a classicist and her interpretation of this poem, written about a week before Plath's suicide, is fresh and startling. Many readers assume that the line "The woman is perfected" refers to a corpse, dressed in a toga with a "smile of accomplishment." Ms. Ruden suggests what is described may be seen as a statue, the kind of memorial a poet has constructed of herself. Plath had said in a letter that she had already written the poems that would make her name.
As grim as some may find the poem, Ms. Ruden rightly sees it as a triumph in esthetic and personal terms. Although she mentions Plath's own study of the classics at Cambridge, she could have linked "Edge" to how the ancients saw suicide as a noble act and not, as in the modern psychologized view of self-annihilation, as a sign of sickness.
Plath studied the stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius, who counseled: "in all things to endeavour to have power of myself." He described the swaying of moods Plath experienced: "as for thy life, consider what it is: a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again." He concluded: "think it no great matter to die many years after, than the very next day."
Plath measured herself against the classical tradition and wanted to do it proud. Ms. Ruden knows that, but perhaps she is not entirely aware how much Plath took Marcus Aurelius to heart.