When Sylvia Plath appears on college syllabi today, what follows is depressingly predictable: She becomes either a martyr for patriarchy or a case study in mental instability. What’s lost in this ideological tug-of-war is any serious consideration of her formidable craftsmanship. Sarah Ruden’s incisive study of Plath, I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, aims to correct this imbalance, redirecting our attention from biography to artistry with the precision of an archer focusing on her shot.
A classicist and translator whose works include renderings of Aristophanes, Vergil, and Augustine, along with a critical study of St. Paul, Ruden has selected six poems—three early and three late—and subjected them to the kind of close linguistic analysis that has largely fallen out of fashion in our theory-addled era. Refreshingly absent is postmodern jargon and ideological grandstanding; present instead is a keen ear attuned to the music of Plath’s lines. Writing of “Mushrooms,” for instance, Ruden notes how “the second stanza embeds heavy o-sounds—notice also the internal near-rhyme of ‘toes’ and ‘noses’ … where the mushrooms are depicted as earthbound bodies, then puffs out a-sounds as they emerge, breathe, and find themselves with minds and the ambition to rise.” In discussing the image of horse and rider in “Ariel,” Ruden observes that the poem opens with “(t)wo short, verbless sentences—the speaker and the horse own the action already, and they are too fast to catch with a verb.” Moments like these are not mere technical showmanship, but are poetry working at the level of embodied cognition, where sound and syntax articulate meaning.
Drawing on her classicism, Ruden connects Plath to earlier poetic traditions, including Metaphysical poets like Donne and Herbert in the way that she brings together “outrageous opposites with an artistic result that transcended, almost to annihilation, the things themselves.” She identifies formal echoes of Sappho in Plath’s use of truncated lines, which signal “that words fail the poet at the end of each unit of thought or memory: emotion is too strong, an impression too powerful.” And Ruden’s study of Plath’s misuse of the Roman “toga” to describe the robes of a Greek figure in “Edge” is masterful in its historical nuance.
Ruden doesn’t eschew biography entirely: She acknowledges the challenges in Plath’s life, including her father’s early death, her mother’s perfectionism, and her abusive marriage to Ted Hughes. But she rejects the “Ariel legend”—the narrative, meticulously cultivated by Hughes as executor of her estate, that depicted Plath’s “pathology” as sweeping her “beyond her marriage, beyond all human help, and into witchy heights of infuriated genius consubstantial with suicide.” Ever the even-handed interpreter, Ruden notes that while both poets might have rewritten their accounts of the marriage, Hughes had a good 35 years longer than Plath to perfect his revision.
No hagiographer, Ruden willingly takes shots at Plath’s excesses, noting that many of her poems “are sometimes tiring to read, full of too many portentous stunts.” She acknowledges that Plath “could not notice the weather without rehearsing metaphors, [and] she abused Roget’s Thesaurus like a drug.” And in reference to Plath’s brief experience as an au pair in “The Babysitters,” Ruden notes that the fussy boy who made Plath match his socks with his jersey “was interviewed as an adult and pronounced on Plath’s shortcomings as an underling.” Yet these criticisms humanize rather than diminish Plath, who emerges as neither angel nor demon but as a driven artist whose linguistic compulsions were both weakness and strength.
Perhaps the book’s most unexpected insight is its emphasis on Plath’s humor. Ruden regularly compares Plath’s jarring juxtapositions to Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations—particularly in “The Applicant,” with its pitch-perfect “mimicry of salesman patter.” This revelation exposes how ideological readings flatten complex works. The progressive narrative needs Plath as a tragic victim, not as a mordant satirist, so crucial dimensions of her art have often been ignored. Ruden restores these dimensions, allowing us to appreciate Plath’s full range as an artist rather than as a political symbol.
The book is not flawless. At just over 100 pages, it can only gesture at how the six focal poems fit into Plath’s oeuvre. Ruden herself occasionally indulges in personal anecdotes that, while illustrating Plath’s universal appeal, distract from the critical project. And Ruden’s choice to exclude Plath’s most famous poems, like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” in order to spotlight underappreciated works means that some of Plath’s most defining artistic statements go unexamined.
Yet these are minor quibbles against the book’s substantial achievement. At a time when poetry is often valued for its identity politics or its rebellion against the imperialistic forces of meaning and lucidity, Ruden’s insistence on the primacy of craft is downright countercultural. She reminds us that “great poetry makes an exquisite, lasting treasure out of passing pain and shortcoming, with deliberated beauty intervening in what is brutal, sordid, ordinary, and self-centered to create a breathtaking balance and a heart-opening sense of the human condition.”
Ruden argues that “Plath’s triumph through language carries special warning and inspiration in the internet age. Words need the kind of care she gave them. They need to be invested with their full weight and seriousness, because they transform reality by performing in it.” In our era of casual linguistic debasement, where words are systematically divorced from meaning to advance political ends, Plath’s uncompromising commitment to linguistic precision stands as a bracing corrective.
Ultimately, what makes I Am the Arrow so valuable is its restoration of agency to Plath. She emerges as a creator-hero who “has been to the underworld and seen the unspeakable realities, yet speaks of them.” The titular arrow, an image from “Ariel,” is seen flying into “the red // Eye” of both the sun and the self (“I”), a fitting metaphor for how the true artist pierces objective and subjective reality with skill rather than sentiment.
I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems
by Sarah Ruden
Library of America, 128 pp., $22
Temple Cone is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.
