Volume 17, Number 2 · August 12, 1971
On Sylvia Plath
By Elizabeth Hardwick
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath
Harper & Row, 296 pp., $6.95
Crossing the Water (to be published September 8)
by Sylvia Plath
Harper & Row, 96 pp., $5.95
In Sylvia Plath's work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general principles, sure origins, applications, or lessons. Her fate and her themes are hardly separate and both are singularly terrible. Her work is brutal, like the smash of a fist; and sometimes it is also mean in its feeling. Literary comparisons are possible, echoes vibrate occasionally, but to whom can she be compared in spirit, in content, in temperament?
Review, 4943 words
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