Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I cringe every time "Daddy" is propped up and wheeled out to exemplify Sylvia Plath's work. Talking back to the father archetype is well and good, but I agree with Meghan O'Rourke ("Stop the Plath Attack," March 2004) that Plath's genius is much bigger than that. The super confident speaker in "Daddy" is atypical of Plath's poems, but that has been deemed her "voice" by critics and anthology readers alike. Maxine Kumin talks about hammering poems into form. I think of a persistent tapping like that used to raise a bowl. Plath, meanwhile, takes a hammer to finished crockery and shatters it with one whack. Her poems are shards arranged to her liking. We get a very different kind of whole, visual to the point of being surreal and sometimes funny. This is often missed. Dark, yes. Grim, mostly. But Plath is hyper-aware of her predicament to the point of self-indictment. In "Lady Lazarus" she is willing to personify the suicidal impulse and disrobe it for the pleasure of an audience. Like the biblical story, it's about rehearsal for the main event, which promises to be an even bigger crowd pleaser. Who else in the theater is, if not laughing, at least smiling? Call it confessional if you want, but Plath makes the leap from autobiography to imagination, which is the difference between her and the many poets who have come in her wake.