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The Death Throes of Romanticism: . . . the cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The "I" of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature—as in the poem "Mirror," the eye of a little god who imagines itself without preconceptions, "unmisted by love or dislike." This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the participant in a dramatic action he does not know is "tragic." He dies, and only we can see the purpose of his death—to illustrate the error of a personality who believed itself godlike. More... One For Life, One For Death: Up Country by Maxine Kumin; Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath . . . all of the poems—those that are obviously not-quite-finished as well as those that are technically perfect—have that exquisite, heartbreaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares. More...
Winter Trees Though critics have begun to react against the initial awe with which Sylvia Plath's posthumous poems were greeted, it seems incontestable to me that her poems, line by line, image by image, are brilliant. Of her emotional and intellectual maturity it is perhaps best to say little, except to point out that poetic genius has rarely depended upon maturity; it is enough to acknowledge the existential authority of these poems, which, ultimately, go beyond criticism. More... Revised
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