Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as though domesticity had choked me.

—Sylvia Plath, letter to her mother, October 12, 1962

Sylvia Plath was the first woman poet I read, after Emily Dickinson: few women were in the canon, and Plath, a brilliant confessional poet, was not.  I discovered Ariel after I read her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which was a best-seller in 1971.  When I mentioned my enthusiasm to a professor, he disparaged her poetry as “second-rate.”  In retrospect, he was a terrible teacher.  The idea is to encourage interest in poetry, not squelch it.  I mean it was Sylvia Plath, not Ogden Nash.

But my taste has changed, and I much prefer Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop these days, though Plath earned her place in the canon.

That said, there was a strange feminist suicide cult in the ’70s surrounding Plath (and the poet Anne Sexton, who also killed herself). Plath was a feminist icon: her life and death were used to illustrate the evils of “male oppression.”

Plath struggled with bipolar disorder and attempted suicide in college. She responded to therapy, medication, and shock treatment and went on to write poetry. She married the glamorous poet Ted Hughes, and they were a gorgeous couple.

But after Plath discovered Ted Hughes’ affair with their friend Alissa Wevill in 1962, he left her with their two children and lived with  Wevill.   Plath spiraled into manic-depression but did  write Ariel.  Then, in 1963, at the age of 30, she killed herself.  And in 1969 Wevill killed herself and the four-year-old child she had with Hughes.

That is three too many deaths, isn’t it?

The biography of Plath at Poem Hunter says,

Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work “spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed,” to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century.

I no longer believe that women’s “madness” is a consequence of sexist society (chemical imbalance is often the problem), but I am horrified that two women involved with Hughes killed themselves.

And today I read a shocking article in The Guardian.   In unpublished letters to her American psychiatrist and friend,

Sylvia Plath alleged Ted Hughes beat her two days before she miscarried their second child and that Hughes wanted her dead, unpublished letters reveal. The two accusations are among explosive claims in unseen correspondence written in the bitter aftermath of one of literature’s most famous and destructive marriages.

I do not jump to conclusions on the basis of an article in The Guardian.  What she wrote in the letters may have been true, or she may have been in a psychotic state.  There will be arguments on both sides.  And I do not know enough about her or Hughes.

But it is very disturbing, and so I hunted up a poem by Plath, in honor of National Poetry Month. .

“Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.