Al Alvarez SEPTEMBER 28, 1989 ISSUE

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Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath

by Anne Stevenson

Houghton Mifflin, 413 pp., $19.95

Sylvia Plath belongs to that curious band of poets—it includes Chatterton, Keats, Rimbaud—whose fame is inextricably bound up with their lives. Rimbaud apart, they died

prematurely, in the full flower of their talent, “just as he really promised something great, ifnot intelligible,” as Byron said of Keats. But Plath’s case is more extreme than that of theothers. Chatterton committed suicide when he was starving to death and became, as aresult, the Romantic symbol of the rejected artist. But at least he didn’t write about the act.Neither did Hart Crane or Hemingway or even, in so many words, Virginia Woolf. ForPlath, death, and the rage and despair that attend it, were her subject, and she followed thelogic of her art to its desolate end. Her last poem, “Edge,” is literally her own epitaph. Her

life and work are not just inextricable, they seem at times virtually indistinguishable.

Although Plath began writing in the 1950s and never relinquished the discipline anddetachment she acquired in her apprenticeship, her work has been overtaken by more

contemporary, less choosy attitudes: by the Warhol concept of art as news, as a form ofcelebrity, of art for gossip’s sake. It is as good a way as any of avoiding the full effect ofwhat she wrote. Most people know about her broken marriage, her outrage, her suicide, butI wonder how many of the thousands who fervently identify with the intensely

autobiographical heroine of The Bell Jar have ever bothered with the difficult, unforgiving,oddly detached late poems.

lath’s case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used thedetails of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpectedtelephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick, everything became usable,charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images whichseem impenetrable at this distance but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by ascholar with full access to the details of her life. Her extraordinary last poems areconcentrated and fast-moving; the images develop one from the other, eliding andexpanding with the authority and directness of a peculiarly dazzling dream. I think she was

able to take these aesthetic risks because the stuff she was transmuting was made up of thecommonplaces of her everyday life, glassily clear and obvious to her. Her poetry was akind of alchemy, turning dross into gold.

Unfortunately, the mundane details of Plath’s life are hard to come by. She died in February

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1963, having published one volume of poetry, The Colossus, and her novel, which was

written under a pseudonym and not much noticed at the time. Ariel, a modified version of aselection she had made of her late poems, appeared in 1965 to great acclaim. In 1971, TheBell Jar was published in the US and became a best seller. In the same year, two furtherselections of her…

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A Poet and Her Myths by Al Alvarez | The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1989/09/28/a-poet-and-her-myths/?pr...

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