Plath Profiles 259

Early Public Representations of Sylvia Plath: An Analysis of the Sylvia

Plath issue of The Review
Gina Hodnik, Northern Illinois University

During its ten year run from 1962 to 1972 The Review was, according to the Dictionary
of Literary Biography, one of the "most influential British Literary Journals of the time" (Serafin
129). Other critics, such as Blake Morrison, have also commented on the magazine's literary
prestige and relevance, noting that "the trenchancy of The Review was acknowledged far beyond
Oxford and London" (Harsent 23). In short, having poems or a critical essay published in The
Review meant that the author was a serious writer. This prestige stems from, in part, the editor
Ian Hamilton's famous rigid standards and honest criticism of poetry. The Review was, as critic
Michael Fried calls it, a "one-man show"; it was "guided by 'man alone' rather than a school of
thought or by some doctrinal expression larger than the self" (Harsent 131, Hoffman, Allen, &
Ulrich 190). Hamilton's heavy-handed involvement in the magazine made the magazine both,
paradoxically, personally biased and unbiased. As an unsponsored publication, a little magazine
is "one which exists, indeed thrives, outside the usual business structure of magazine production
and distribution; it is independent, amateur and
idealistic- it doesn't…need to print anything it doesn't
want to print" (Hamilton, The Little Magazines: A
Study of Six Editors 7-8). This made it possible to
write more honest criticism without trying to please
the larger forces of the publishing world. However,
since little magazines, such as The Review, remained
under the control of one editor, it would be
impossible to say that personal predisposition did not
bias the magazine.
Specifically, the special Sylvia Plath issue of
The Review appears to be shaped by personal
involvement, not just by Hamilton but also by Ted
Hughes, Plath's husband, and Al Alvarez, their friend
Hodnik 260

and fellow writer. The issue was published in October of 1963, just eight months after Plath's
suicide, and includes seven poems, some previously unpublished, as well as a critical essay by
Alvarez. In an epistolary correspondence between Hughes and Hamilton before publication,
Hughes told Hamilton that, in talking with Alvarez, they both felt that "his piece wouldn't make
sense if some of the poems he mentions weren't with it," so Hughes sent Hamilton these poems,
in addition to poems not mentioned in Alvarez's essay.1 Looking not only at the poems included
("Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "Fever 103°," "Nick and the Candlestick," "Brasilia," "Mary's Song,"
and "Lesbos") and the Alvarez essay in the magazine issue itself, but also selected letters and
criticism of the time, provides evidence that Hamilton, Alvarez, and Hughes together, purposely
or unconsciously, argued for a very specific view of Plath and her poetry. The Plath issue of The
Review, along with manuscript material, seems to suggest that the poems she wrote in the last
few months of her life are a medium for Plath to forge a separate identity through self-control.
Portraying Plath in this way additionally gives her a distinct identity as a writer, separate from
her domestic life and the drama connected with it.
One distinguishing characteristic of Alvarez's essay in the Plath issue is that he uses the
poems to outline distinct personality traits. Alvarez does not merely examine connecting images
in her poems; he uses repeated images in her poetry and her techniques to suggest that Plath, in
her poetry, attempted to create a distinct identity through the obvious rejection of domestic roles.
In his essay, Alvarez notes that Plath's "real poems began in 1960, after the birth of her daughter
Frieda" while "her most creative period followed the birth of her son, two years later" ("Sylvia
Plath" 77). For Alvarez, "it is as though the child were a proof of her identity, as though it
liberated her into her real self" (77). Alvarez's essay and the selected poems in the Plath issue
suggest that Plath attempts to reject these old roles to establish her own separate identity. More
importantly, the essay and selected poems, by not focusing on her marriage to Hughes, separate
Plath from the drama associated with her married life.
Alvarez commends Plath on her ability "to make startling images out of humdrum
objects"; she makes the familiar and predictable new (76). In other words, altering familiar
domestic images parallels Plath's need to make her established roles new; she attempts to change
her identity into something unique. In the poems selected for The Review Plath makes the

1
Found in Box 1, folder 9 of The Review Manuscripts collection in Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern
Illinois University.
Plath Profiles 261

domestic realm startling by connecting it with mass extinction. Once again, of all the poems
Hughes could have selected to send to Hamilton, Hughes selected a prevalent number of poems
connecting domestic life to mass extinction and the Holocaust, such as "Mary's Song," "Daddy,"
and "Lesbos," perhaps attempting to emphasize Plath's need to destroy the binding established
roles of mother and daughter. In "Mary's Song," the image of the "Sunday lamb [that] cracks in
its fat," a sign of motherly domesticity in that it involves a woman preparing a meal for the
household, turns from familiar and expected into the unexpected and violent when Plath
compares cooking to "melting the tallow heretics, / ousting the Jews" (Plath, Selected Poems
257). First, connecting this domestic act to the mass destruction of the Jews subverts the
domestic role; through her poetry, Plath makes a familiar role new. Also, the parallel to mass
destruction illustrates the reason for making this domestic role new and unexpected: domesticity
can damage a woman's sense of self. The Holocaust images in "Daddy" also suggest that Plath
wants to recreate her previous role as daughter, a role that destroys her sense of self. She
connects the father to Hitler by calling him "a man in black with a Meinkampf look" (224). By
linking her father with Hitler and herself with a Jew, she subverts her traditional role of a
daughter and emphasizes the destructive power of this established role. In "Lesbos," she also
links a more standard domestic role with destruction when she describes the "viciousness in the
kitchen" with the "fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine" (227). Here, the
kitchen appears to be a painful place that can bring only harm to the occupant. In these selected
poems, Plath rejects an old way of life by altering it into something new, but also in connecting
domestic roles to images of mass destruction which implies that she needs to destroy these
established roles before they destroy her as an individual.
The vampire bat is one connecting image that illustrates an attempt to shed the pre-
established roles of daughter and mother. The bat represents feeling suffocated from a
domineering force, a dominant identity. In "Nick and the Candlestick," Plath is a "miner"
exploring caves where the "black bat airs / wrap [her], raggy shawls" and "weld to [her] like
plums" (240-241). The bat image enfolds the woman; by connecting the bat airs to a shawl,
Plath suggests that it covers her. The word "weld" characterizes the bat as a force that wraps
around her persistently, which covers her completely. Furthermore, by setting the scene in a
cave, Plath emphasizes a feeling of being enclosed, suffocated. The bat imagery in "Lesbos"
likewise symbolizes a larger force that encircles Plath, a force so dominant it begins to erase her
Hodnik 262

identity. In "Lesbos," she complains that the other woman's "voice" is her "ear-ring, / flapping
and sucking, blood loving bat" (229). Someone else's voice wraps around her; the voice, as a
bat, is a force that dominates Plath, preventing her from hearing her own voice. In "Daddy," the
bat acts again as a dominant force that muffles the Plath, literally sucking away her life; she
experiences "the vampire who said he was [her father] / and drank [her] blood for a year" (224).
Plath extends the image of the bat, connecting it even more to vampirism by then likening her
father to a vampire with "a stake in [his] fat black heart" (224). Her father and the man who
resembles him, Hughes, are portrayed as forces that drain her identity; her identity exists only in
relation to them.
Additionally, over half of the seven selected poems end with the image of Plath rejecting
dominant forces that previously controlled her. At the end of "Daddy," she manages to throw
off this dominant vampire that sucks out her life, her identity. She says to her domineering
father that she "[has] had to kill [him]" (222). Significantly, she ends by again talking directly to
her father, saying, "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through" (224). Plath finally stands up to the
vampire-like force, the "black shoe" that she has "lived like a foot," trying to mold to (222).
Alvarez notes that Plath "seemed convinced, in these last poems, that the root of her suffering
was the death of her father […] who dragged her after him" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 81). "Lady
Lazarus" revolts against a dominant parental force that shaped Plath's identity; the poem
describes her as someone else's "valuable / the pure gold baby" (Plath, Selected Poems 246). She
prefaces these descriptions with "I am," thereby connecting her identity to being an object of
value, a child, for someone else (246). By telling the audience repeatedly to "Beware" and by
rising up to "eat men like air," she then illustrates her revolt against the forces that previously
shaped her identity; she finally stands up, rises, for herself (246-247). In these two poems, Plath
specifically rejects her established child identity; she refuses to be defined through her parents.
She is no longer someone's child; instead, she takes a step towards becoming her own separate
individual.
In "Fever 103°" and "Lesbos," Plath likewise attempts to break free from confining
means of identity. In "Fever 103°," she destroys her other self, the one that depends on another
person. She says she cannot try to be like other people- "not him, nor him"- and then describes
her "selves dissolving" (232). The selves that are based on other people, specifically men, are
destroyed. In "Lesbos," she also distances herself from a dominant force who attempts to suck
Plath Profiles 263

out her identity by finally stating that "even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet" (230). Plath
declines a connection with this woman who talks so much that Plath cannot hear her own voice;
by not meeting with the other woman, she refuses to be a part of her.
As a final step, Plath does more than just reject an identity that ties her to domineering
forces; she also begins to create her new and separate self. Agreeing with Leonard Sanazaro,
critics Guinevara Nance and Judith Jones feel that the Ariel poems, which include the poems
published in The Review, purposely uses images associated with transformation and exorcism to
lead to a creation of a new self and a rejection of old fantasies (Wagner-Martin, Critical Essays
on Sylvia Plath 89, 139). Plath represents a new and separate self in these selected poems
through images of rebirth. In "Lady Lazarus," Plath goes beyond rejecting her old identity to
actually creating a new identity. She "turn[s] and burn[s]" and then turns to "ash"; Plath's old
self dissolves, burns away (Plath, Selected Poems 246). Then Plath invokes the phoenix, a
mythical bird that is reborn from the ashes of its death fire, by rising "out of the ash" (247). By
rising out of the ash, Plath’s speaker is reborn; she has successfully created a new self, a new
identity. Likewise, in "Fever 103°" Plath also experiences rebirth from the ashes of fire.
Throughout the poem the she burns up with a fever; she is, metaphorically, on fire. She asks the
audience if "[her] heat astound[s] [them]" which makes it seem as if she were on fire (232). She
"thinks [she] may rise" from this fire and she does, reborn from her own death (232). The
images of rebirth suggest a creation of a new self; Plath finally takes control of the dominant
forces that control her identity to create her own separate identity.
Similarly, the images of birth present throughout these poems indicate the creation of a
new person, a new self. In her Plath biography, Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson thinks that "Nick
and the Candlestick" merges Plath's "dual duties as mother by day and writer by night, writing by
candlelight" (271). In "Nick and the Candlestick," when Plath discusses her existence as a
writer, a separate person not tied to her children, she exists in an "old cave," described as an
"earthen womb" (Plath, Selected Poems 241, 240). In a sense, she has returned to an embryonic
state, ready for birth. The same image of the Earth as a mother also presents itself in "Brasilia."
Plath first identifies herself as a mother, telling the reader that "[her] baby" has "driven" his nail
in her thumb (258). However, Plath then claims that she is "nearly extinct"; her identity as a
mother fades (258). She then invokes the "red earth, motherly blood" that eats "people like light
rays," but the Earth doesn't swallow her; she will not be reborn from an earthen womb (258-259).
Hodnik 264

Instead, she remains "one mirror safe"; she continues to reflect others, as a mirror does, and does
not get a chance at rebirth (259). Regardless, "Brasilia" shows Plath's desire to eradicate her
domestic identity through rebirth.
Alvarez also comments on Plath creating a new identity in her later poems; to Alvarez,
Plath's later poems are vocal poems, meant, as she states in her 1962 interview with Peter Orr,
"to be read out loud" (Orr 171). Only when Plath "had discovered her own speaking voice; that
is, her own identity" could she "write poems out loud" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 77). Alvarez
connects this later group of poems to Plath's search for a separate identity with the sound of her
poems. Interestingly, Linda Wagner-Martin notes that Alvarez's review of Plath's The Colossus
in The Observer was "a highly favorable notice, but had one reservation— that Plath has not yet
developed a constant voice" (Sylvia Plath: A Biography 180). In evaluating some of Plath's
newer poems in the essay in The Review, Alvarez feels that Plath had found her voice; she had
created a separate identity from Ted Hughes. Critics at the time also acknowledge this aspect of
her poetry. Richard Howard feels that Plath "prefers to make [the audience] hear what she sees,"
and the fault in the poems is when she becomes too "concerned with texture and loses the image"
(Wagner-Martin, Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath 45). Judson Jerome takes a similar view of
Plath's poems; he says they restore his faith in poetry because her descriptions "create certain
sounds and textures" (44). In his review, Mark Linenthal also praises Plath's ability to make a
poem of sounds, calling the sounds of the poems "masculine and strong" (47).
In many of the poems selected for the Plath issue, a woman has problems speaking; as
Alvarez suggests in his article, Plath must find her voice to find her own identity. In "Daddy,"
she says that she "never could talk to [her] father," and that she "could hardly speak" in general
(Plath, Selected Poems 223). Furthermore, she says that she then "began to talk like a Jew" until
she thinks she "may well be a Jew" (223). Her absence of speech, absence of individual voice,
emphasizes her lack of individual identity. Because Plath relates the father-daughter relationship
to the hierarchy between a German soldier and a Jew, talking like a Jew means that she talks like
a submissive daughter instead of an individual; Plath fits into an inferior role. Similarly, in
"Lesbos," she grows "silent" and "[does] not speak" when in contact with a controlling force
(229). She listens to the woman who preys upon her like a "blood-loving bat" and sucks out her
life (229). In these poems, Plath loses her voice, her identity, when under control of dominant
Plath Profiles 265

forces that bind her into a submissive role. Only by throwing off these forces and speaking for
herself, finding her own voice, can Plath create a separate identity.
The Plath issue of The Review portrays the poet as a woman concerned with creating a
new identity separate from her domestic and familial identity. Alvarez's article also argues that
she seeks this identity, gains this rebirth, through extreme self-control. Generally, through this
self-control, Plath removes the control from others: only she can define her self. Specifically,
Plath attempts to exert control through self-violence, equaling her oppressors in their cruelty.
She attempts to control her emotions both in real life and in her poetry.
Alvarez notes that Plath "was disciplined in art, as in everything else" ("Sylvia Plath" 76).
As a friend and reader of her work, Alvarez notes Plath's perfectionism, her need to control her
life. Other critics and biographers also note this trait in relation to her poetry: Linda Wagner-
Martin reiterates the idea throughout her biography that, for Plath, "enjoying an activity was not
enough reason for spending time on it" (Sylvia Plath: A Biography 38). Wagner-Martin also
mentions that Plath devoted her time to endeavors that would bring success; for instance, she quit
playing piano as a child because she was not very good and, therefore, would not earn any prizes
(38). Wagner-Martin illustrates Plath's drive for success and her intense self-control; when Plath
had a goal, nothing would get in the way, not even herself. In her letters to her mother, Plath
often references the amount of control that went in to her writing process, saying on May 1,
1961, for example, that she has "been writing seven mornings a week at the Merwin's study and
[has] done better things than ever before" (Letters Home 418). Plath describes her writing
schedule in detail to her mother on October 12, 1962, telling her that every morning she is "up
about five, in [her] study with coffee, writing like mad- have managed a poem a day before
breakfast" (466). In life and in her writing, Plath remained controlled and efficient.
Alvarez believes that Plath attempts to achieve total self-control by turning "the violence
against herself so as to show that she can equal her oppressors with her self-inflicted oppression"
("Sylvia Plath" 82). He then connects this need for self-control to identity, noting that "by
inflicting this upon yourself you achieve your identity, you become free" (82). This theory of the
need for an artist to destroy themselves through self-inflicted violence later develops into
Alvarez's theory of Extremist Art, which he explains in The Savage God: A Study of Suicide,
published in 1972, eight years after his essay in the Plath issue of The Review was printed. For
Alvarez an extreme "artist deliberately explores in himself that narrow violent area between the
Hodnik 266

viable and the impossible" in order to produce art (The Savage God 267). Furthermore, it is
widely known that "Alvarez favors poetry which lives on the edge psychologically of the
extreme. He champions poetry that tackles directly personal or historical situations rather than
sweeping them under the carpet or refusing to deal with them" (Baker 1). Michael Payne, in an
essay about Alvarez, notes that Plath is an apotheosis of his ideas about how an extreme artist
turns a "craftsman-like transformation of extreme mental suffering into art in such a way that it
produces something perhaps new and exciting" (Holden & Kermode 90). In other words, Plath
creates a distinct new identity in her poems by taking control of her suffering.
The selected poems in the Plath issue all share images of personal destruction, most
commonly in the form of Holocaust references. In "Daddy," she confesses that she has a
proclivity to self torture: "every woman adores a Fascist, / the boot in the face" (Plath, Selected
Poems 223). The desire for a boot in the face shows a masochistic tendency; Plath wants to be
hurt. In "Lady Lazarus" she also adores self-torture; she tries to kill herself and she "[does] it so
it feels like hell" (245). Yet, for all the times she attempts suicide, she comes back in "broad day
/ to the same place, the same face, the same brute" (246). Despite wanting to escape the pain of
daily life, Plath always comes back as "the same, identical woman" (245). At the end of "Lady
Lazarus," Plath points out that she cannot kill the body; she must control this same identical
identity by destroying it and rising with a new identity. "Fever 103°" modifies the need for self-
control by presenting the Plath's desire to control her own suffering: she is "in a fright / one scarf
will catch and anchor in the wheel" (231). In this allusion to the death of dancer Isadora Duncan,
who was killed when her scarf caught in the wheel of a car, Plath expresses fright at dying
accidently; she wishes to control her own pain and death. Violence for Plath is a means of
power; in fact, "most of her later poems are about just that: about the unleashing of power, about
tapping that roots of her own inner violence" (Alvarez, "Sylvia Plath" 78). The poem also
contains a reference to "Hiroshima ash," which invokes images of mass destruction and torture
(Plath, Selected Poems 231). "Mary's Song" contains more vivid references to mass destruction;
Plath compares a Sunday dinner to "ousting the Jews" in the Holocaust (257). Even Hamilton
notes that, in "Mary's Song," "roasting the Sunday lamb can be seen finally as a holocaust"
(Against Oblivion 299). Pain for Plath "is a heart / this holocaust [she] walk[s] in," meaning that
her daily holocaust exists in her heart; it is self-created hell (Plath, Selected Poems 257). In
"Nick and the Candlestick," Plath's self-pain appears less pronounced, not as extreme, but she
Plath Profiles 267

still tells her child that "the pain / [he] wake[s] to is not [his]"; the pain is the mother's self-
induced pain (241).
By inflicting violence and destruction on herself Plath not only gains control of herself,
she also destroys her previous self to create a new identity. The Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography entry on Ian Hamilton indicates Hamilton believes that "good poems were likely, in a
more general sense, to show a union of suffering and control" (Miller). In other words, to create
good poetry, some suffering is involved, but only closely controlled suffering. When Hughes
sent Hamilton the photograph used for the cover of the Plath issue, he warned Hamilton to guard
it carefully because Plath had very thoroughly destroyed all photos of herself and Hughes only
had a few photos of Sylvia in his possession.2 In real life, Plath had destroyed a representation of
her old self, a photo; perhaps this was a way to exert control over her old self, a self based upon
relationships with her family and Hughes, in order to establish a new separate identity. By
turning her strongest feelings into objective images, Plath proves that she is in control of her self
and her poetry.
Critical reviews written before the publication of Ariel, the book from which the selected
poems in The Review come from, highlight Plath's lack of control over her poetic persona and
her emotions in her first poetry collection, The Colossus. In an article written before his essay in
The Review, Alvarez praises The Colossus: he describes the strongest parts of her poetic style as
"no-nonsense" and "bare but vivid and precise" (Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: The Critical
Heritage 34). His praise of her stems from his observation that some parts of the poems manage
to steer clear of emotional excess. He does acknowledge that her poems have weak spots: "at
times her feeling weakens, the language goes off on its own and she lands in blaring rhetoric"
(35). For Alvarez, the best part of Plath's early group of poems is her focus on connecting
simple images and not in her emotional connection with subjects. Significantly, Hamilton also
published an article on Plath in July of 1963, three months before the Plath edition of The
Review. Unlike Alvarez, however, Hamilton critiques her earlier poetry harshly. He begins by
calling The Colossus a "witty and sophisticated first volume" — but that is the only praise he
gives the book (Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage 48). Like Alvarez, he finds
Plath's strongest poems to have minimal personal involvement; he criticizes her for emotional

2
Found in Box 6, folder 67 of The Review Manuscripts collection in Rare Books and Special Collections at
Northern Illinois University.
Hodnik 268

excess. Hamilton also criticizes Alvarez's 1960 review in The Observer for praising the intensity
of certain poems. For Hamilton, Plath's poems "take the concrete world and fragment it into
emblems of menace" (49). Hamilton writes that "less successful poems testify to the appalling
difficulties she faced as a persona and a poet" (49). Hamilton obviously feels that Plath's earlier
poetry, while important enough to publish a review about it, shows her struggle to carve out a
poetic identity which relies too heavily on emotion.
When reviewing poems from Ariel, however, Alvarez notes a change in style and a more
definitive voice. In a 1965 review, Alvarez praises the emotion surging through that collection.
Ariel, as a collection, appears more emotionally wrought than The Colossus because many of the
poems were written around or after her separation from Hughes; the poems in Ariel are angrier.
He marvels at how one incident "gathers into a whole complicated nexus of feelings" (Wagner-
Martin, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage 57). In this later review, Alvarez praises the excess
of emotion because of the way Plath presents it. In his essay in the Plath issue of The Review,
Alvarez notes that the "more objective [the details] seem, the more subjective they, in fact,
become" ("Sylvia Plath" 78). In other words, Plath manages to use an objective and impersonal
image to accurately capture her deepest emotional state. He later comments that "what is
remarkable about the poem[s] is the objectivity with which she handles such personal material"
(80). In addition, in an interview with Gregory Lestage, Alvarez mentions that Plath's "rage is so
beautifully controlled" (Holden & Kermode 125). Through her poetry, Plath shows that, as a
poet, she has mastery over her emotional states.
Hamilton views this objectivity of personal matter and the use of minimal images as a
mark of strong poetry. Friends and colleagues note Hamilton believed that good poetry should
be austere; Dan Jacobson mentions that Pound's imagist project was important to Hamilton and
that Hamilton felt that "the poet should get to the heart of the matter…and then get rid of the
furniture" (Harsent 90). Jacobson also mentions that Hamilton hated "the idea of narrative in
poetry" (89). As an interesting side note, Hamilton outwardly showed signs of his interest in
minimalism: he ate little to nothing at restaurants. Julian Barnes recounts that Hamilton left his
plate "piled with food"; Alvarez mentions that Hamilton "ends up eating almost nothing"; and
Douglas Dunn mentions "Ian's lack of appetite" (18, 36, 60). Hamilton's Spartan dining habit
highlights one of his key beliefs as an editor: The Review was respected, as Andrew Motion
mentions, for its "mixture of heady austerity and an unnerving but familiar tone" (37). This
Plath Profiles 269

explains why he viewed some of Plath's earlier poems negatively for having too much personal
involvement and emotion even though Peter Dales notes that he thinks she offers "the chance of
something more viable in some way- 'feelingful'" (50). In short, Plath's later poems are stronger,
according to Hamilton and Alvarez, because she exhibits a mastery over her emotional states;
she can shape them into any image she chooses.
Overall, the Plath issue of The Review emphasizes Plath's creation of a new identity
through self-control, both in her own life and in her poems. Given this specific portrayal of
Plath, one wonders why Hamilton, Alvarez, and Hughes chose to emphasize Plath as an
individual, separate from her family members. Perhaps Hughes and Alvarez wanted to prevent
readers from connecting her with her separation from Hughes and her suicide; the poems and
essay in The Review, which emphasize the creation of a new self, seems to insist that Plath
should be viewed independently as a writer and not as a mother, wife, daughter, or even a
neurotic. Alvarez may have had personal motivation to make this connection: Anne Stevenson
notes that Plath was "in her most positive housekeeping-mothering phase" when Alvarez came to
interview Hughes for The Observer (Stevenson 196). He met her without realizing that he had
published her poem "Night Shift" in The Observer.3 Stevenson notes throughout her narrative
that Plath kept up correspondence with Alvarez, informing him about her creative breakthroughs.
She charts their burgeoning relationship; in the summer of 1962, "Sylvia was beginning to feel at
ease with Alvarez" (247). Alvarez initially judged Plath, thinking of her only in relation to
Hughes. Perhaps this mistake made him wary of seeing her too strongly as a housewife; after the
separation from Hughes and her suicide, it would be all too easy for the public to focus more on
her familial relations than her poetry style. Maybe he wanted the public to view her,
immediately, as he eventually thought of her: a skilled poet. Alvarez, in an interview with
George Lestage in 1996, said that there were "two Sylvia Plaths: One is the woman who wrote
The Bell Jar and then had that famous marital break-up […]. The other Sylvia is the poet who
wrote these unbelievably good poems" (Holden & Kermode 125). Looking back over thirty
three years of Plath scholarship, Alvarez criticizes the response to Plath as a feminist icon,
wishing that some of the earlier critics had seen past her marital and mental difficulties. It is as
if, in the essay in The Review, Alvarez anticipates this reaction to Plath and attempts to prevent
it.

3
"Night Shift" was published under the title "Poem" on June 14, 1959, page 22.
Hodnik 270

Hughes also plays a role, although minor, in the characterization of Plath in Alvarez's
essay. First, the references to Hughes in Alvarez's article are scarce. Alvarez mentions him only
twice: once as the person Plath "married in 1956" and then as an "influence" on her work
("Sylvia Plath" 75, 76). As discussed earlier, Hughes's letter to Hamilton shows that Hughes had
an influence over the poems presented in the Plath issue of The Review, but the amount of his
influence on Alvarez's essay remains unknown. Nearly eight years after the Plath issue of The
Review was published, The Times informed the public that The Observer would not print the
second installment of The Savage God that dealt with Plath's "road to suicide" because Hughes
complained that Alvarez's memoir was written without consulting him and that Alvarez's facts
are "not only extremely fragmentary, they are mostly wrong" ("Sylvia Plath Memoir Dropped"
14). Alvarez countered that he wrote to counteract the Plath myths out of deep respect for her.
Hughes refused to relent. The article in The Times provided evidence that Hughes wanted to keep
Plath's dramatic personal life, which obviously included him, out of discussions about her poetry.
Another interesting feature of Alvarez's essay, which removes the dramatic aspects of Plath's life,
is that he does not use the word "suicide" to describe Plath's death. He refers only to her "death"
and her "world collapsing" ("Sylvia Plath" 76, 80). In fact, the only time he does use the word is
when he refers to a "near suicide at the age of nineteen" (76). Based on these cues, it seems
probable that Hughes and Alvarez wanted to prevent readers from connecting Plath with her
separation from Hughes and her suicide and instead attempted to suggest that readers should
view her independently as a writer.
Plath Profiles 271

Works Cited
Alvarez, Al. "Sylvia Plath." Ed. Ian Hamilton. The Modern Poet. New York: Horizon
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