Kimber’s Reviews > Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath > Status Update

She believed in "going thru and facing the worst, not hiding from it. She told Aurelia, "it's too bad my poems frighten you- but you've always been afraid of reading or seeing the world's hardest things- like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen.

Sylvia would no longer allow Ted to come back to Court Green "every week to make my life miserable, kick me about and assure himself that he has a ghastly limiting wife." He had let Nicholas fall out of his pram, she claimed, and called him a usurper. She added that Ted "beat me up physically" in February 1961, two days before her miscarriage.

...the most exciting American poetry was not by "elegant academicians "...Not Wilbur, Merwin, Stevens or Moore, but Lowell, Snodgrass and Sexton. Sexton pulled Plath closer to the short lines, quick cadences and bursts of Ariel.

When a book publisher asked her for a brief biography she listed her occupation as "Housewife and mother of two small children," rather than "writer," above a list of her considerable publications.

It must have seemed that she had achieved nearly every goal she had set herself- she had married a brilliant poet; she was soon to become a mother; she had found a charming flat in central London; she had just signed a contract for her first book.

Would Sylvia tame and domesticate Ted and introduce neat, witty mannerisms or would he rather liberate Sylvia's previously repressed passions?

The Bell Jar exposed not only the horrors of Plath's own early psychiatric treatment but the treatment of women psychiatric patients generally. The novel is usually read as a coming of age tale...but it is also an eloquent and prescient work of social protest by an emboldened voice of dissent.

She was slowly discovering the themes and symbols that would flow through her best poetry: "the bleak, keen exaltation that comes from a journey through the realms of suffering toward heightened feeling; it is exaltation that may be likened to the blue steel edge of a freshly whetted knife." (1951 paper titled "Modern Tragedy in the Classic Tradition")

Many of her peers were awed by her achievements, yet she still worried that others viewed her as queer and reclusive.

She would return to the image of the disenfranchised woman in both "The Bell Jar" and "Ariel," in which her female characters deliver scathing critiques of the patriarchal, conformist society that had relegated them to the margins.