When Sylvia Plath appears on college syllabi today, what follows is depressingly predictable: She becomes either a martyr for patriarchy or a case study in mental instability. What’s lost in this ideological tug-of-war is any serious consideration of her formidable craftsmanship. Sarah Ruden’s incisive study of Plath, I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, aims to correct this imbalance, redirecting our attention from biography to artistry with the precision of an archer focusing on her shot.
The post Plath’s Poetry—Minus the Pathology appeared first on .
