Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

It seems inevitable that the word “ambition” would appear in Ange Mlinko’s piece [“Safer Than Ambien,” January 2013]. Plath is lauded because her poems are ambitious. Bishop’s poems, apparently because they are mere “observations,” are not ambitious. Would that more 
poets might aspire to poems that are not outwardly ambitious — that do not set out to ravish us with their music, wisdom, or what have you. Is the implied corollary of a poem’s lack of ambition self-satisfaction? Bishop’s poems will long outlast Plath’s, quiet though they are.