I'd been thinking about launching a topic myself called "Sylvia Plath, Formalist"! And I'm glad to learn that some other Eratosphereans appreciate this poet's great artistry. Sometimes Sylvia's life flew out of control, but she was always in total control of her poetry.
She has not been served well by her biographers, especially Anne Stevenson who was tempted to share writing credit with Olywyn Hughes, Ted's sister, who exercised iron control over the book's content. Olwyn and Sylvia despised one another so a book controlled by Olwyn could never be fair.
According to Elaine Feinstein's new bio of Ted Hughes, Ted himself didn't even recognize the Sylvia portrayed in her bios. The last months of her life, were, of course, dreadful. I've always thought that prescription drugs played a key role in the suicide. A neighbor saw her walking around in a daze that night, a daze that might have indeed been drug-induced. To my mind, too, her big tragic flaw (Ted's also) was the mythologizing of the self. She thought of their union as something huge, something titanic, on a higher plane than other unions, so of course when the marriage failed, she crashed.
But there I go, dwelling on the life instead of the work, like too many others. Have you noted, Alicia, that along with slant rime, Sylvia was an expert at syllabics? That "Rhyme" poem is in almost-perfect syllabics, bobbling a bit only at the word "myself." So is her heralded early poem, "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" -- perfect syllabics sustained over 13 stanzas. Yet while many purely syllabic poems (to my ear) seem stiff and clunky and attitude-copping, this poem reads very naturally. Almost every poem of Sylvia's displays what I call the "umbrella idea" -- an overriding concept or focus. One image or one action serves as the poem's organizing device -- e.g. "tulips" or "mirror" or a surgical operation or hunting for mussels or picking blackberries. This is the main thing I learned from her. Some poets are just so ... diffuse!
Did she ever write a poem that didn't achieve her aims? I'd argue, no. If some dislike the more raw late poems, it's probably due to an aversion to the subject matter and not the execution. I also think that some readers miss the humor; if you read "Daddy" as a loopy, even drunken soliloquy, it's quite a lark. Same with "Lady Lazarus," a real performance piece. The only poem I turn my head from is "Edge," the final poem, in which "the woman is perfected," having killed herself along with her children (the death wish wins, and won, alas) but even here I can't fault the artistry.
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