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. Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1988. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 17, 1981; Volume 50, 1988; Volume 51, 1989. The reason I mention this occasion is that as much as I wanted to understand Sylvia Plath, this book of poetry only became accessible once I began to understand Linda's ability to open herself to others. Plath bared herself in a way in which I not only felt awkward and shy, but with a power that initially made me feel like I was sitting too close to the stage, as it were. Here was a woman who wrote without any apology for who she was. In my estimation she offended the very ones who felt obliged to judge and evaluate her.

Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959, Lund University Press, 1994.In the first few stanzas, Plath seems exasperated with her father’s monumentality, expressing her fear that she “shall never get [him] put together entirely.” Further, she is dismissive of what she perceives as smugness in his desire to be an oracle, when all he can produce is unpleasant animal noise. Considering the emotions at display here, it is unclear why she would bother to scale the statue.

The Colossus’ by Sylvia Plath is a complex poem that expresses the poet’s sorrow after her father’s death through the image of a statue. Perloff, Marjorie, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1990. Sylvia Plath's first collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in England in October 1960 and in the US in 1962. Crossing the Water, the third of Plath's collections, was published posthumously, after Ariel, in 1971. It contains some poems written around the same time as those in The Colossus ('Private Ground' (CW) and 'The Manor Garden' (C) were both written in 1959) and others which predate, or in some cases coincide with, the poems of Ariel; 'In Plaster' (CW), for example, was written on the same day as Ariel's 'Tulips'.

Success!

Van Dyke, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993.