Volume 36, Number 14 · September 28, 1989
A Poet and Her Myths
By Al Alvarez
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, if not intelligible,' as Byron said of Keats. But Plath's case is more extreme than that of the others. Chatterton committed suicide when he was starving to death and became, as a result, 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. For Plath, death, and the rage and despair that attend it, were her subject, and she followed the logic 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.
Review, 4094 words
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