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After Plath’s death, The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, a book for children, was also discovered among her papers and published posthumously. The story features Max Nix, a resident of Winkelburg, who happily acquires a modest “woolly, whiskery brand-new mustard-yellow suit.” Nicci Gerrard wrote in the Observer,“There’s no disturbance in the world of Winkelburg: even Max’s desire for a suit is as shallow and clear as the silver stream that runs like a ribbon through the valley.” Despite the lasting impression of Plath’s bleak art and early death, Gerrard concluded that “small pieces of happiness like this little book remind us of her life.”
Van Dyke, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993.
Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990. However, in the last half of the poem, the speaker moves toward the position of what critic Linda K. Bundtzen calls "a worshipful supplicant" who seems totally "married to her mourning." Though she has seemingly sacrificed her own life and autonomy in an attempt to hear the statue speak, she comes to term with that sacrifice. Enjambment is another important technique in this poem. Its seen a few times as the poet cuts off lines before their conclusion and creates a new stanza or line. For example, the transition between lines three and four of the first stanza and lines three and four of the second stanza.
Under pseudonym Victoria Lucas) The Bell Jar (novel), Heinemann (London, England), 1963, published under real name, Faber (London, England), 1965, Harper (New York, NY), 1971. Axelrod, Steven Gould, Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1990. Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996. Seamus Heaney. "The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath." in The Government of the Tongue. NY: Faber, 1988, p. 154. I fell into Plath's spell on several occasions during my freshman year. In many ways, I felt a strange discontinuity in my life when I read her, as if what I was studying in class had little to do with the life force struggling to live and burst forth from the earth. One was in my head and the other permeated everything else inside me.Newman considered The Bell Jar a “testing ground” for Plath’s poems. It is, according to the critic, “one of the few American novels to treat adolescence from a mature point of view. ... It chronicles a nervous breakdown and consequent professional therapy in non-clinical language. And finally, it gives us one of the few sympathetic portraits of what happens to one who has genuinely feminist aspirations in our society, of a girl who refuses to be an event in anyone’s life. ... [Plath] remains among the few woman writers in recent memory to link the grand theme of womanhood with the destiny of modern civilization.” Plath told Alvarez that she published the book under a pseudonym partly because “she didn’t consider it a serious work ... and partly because she thought too many people would be hurt by it.”
Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (radio play; broadcast on British Broadcasting Corporation in 1962; limited edition), Turret Books, 1968.Stevenson, Anne, Bitter Fame: The Undiscovered Life of Sylvia Plath, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1989. Critical Survey, September, 2000, James Booth, "Competing Pulses: Secular and Sacred in Hughes, Larkin, and Plath," p. 3. The strange psyche at the core of these poems is made powerful by its seemingly limitless ability to endure self-destruction. But before the destruction, we get to watch Plath begin to become a great poet. Most poets slowly edge their way, poem by poem then book by book, to their major work. Plath got there in a couple of bursts — first here in The Colossus, then a few years later in the months before she died when she wrote much of what would become Ariel. As tragic and dark as her end would be, it's nonetheless thrilling to watch this great artist becoming herself. Editor) American Poetry Now (supplement number 2 to Critical Quarterly,) Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1961.
The imagery is so poignant in these first lines and becomes even more so as the metaphor slowly starts to reveal itself. Readers should also take note of the neologisms in this stanza. These, including “Mule-bray,” are supposed to bring the image of the animal to mind as well as the sound that it makes. She’s describing the statue as making these noises. They’re all, oddly, coming out of its mouth. These sounds are “bawdy” and animalistic. It is not something the speaker admires, in fact, it comes across as disturbing and even somewhat sexual. Linda would often sit or walk with me when I was under the spell and I would talk breathlessly about one point or another, all with what I thought was an emulation of Plath's deep seated passion. One morning walking across campus, me to chemistry and she to a literature class, she stopped me and we stood facing one another. She smiled at the surprised look on my face. She kissed me on the cheek, and turned and walked away. I stood stunned, unable to comprehend. Finally I went on to chemistry class, although unable to concentrate.Guardian (Manchester, England), August 18, 2001, Christina Patterson, "Ted on Sylvia, for the Record," p. R3.