Revising Life: Sylvia Plaths Ariel Poems

Provides a compelling argument for Plaths revision of the painful parts of her life -- the failed marriage, her anxiety for success, and her ambivalence towards her mother. . . . The reader will feel the tension in the poetry and the life.<i>CHOICE</i> [Examines] Plaths twin goals of becoming a famous poet and a perfect mother. . . . This books main points are clearly and forcefully argued: that both poems and babies require struggle, pain, endless labor, and . . . fears of monstrous offspring and that, in the end, Plath ran out of the resources necessary to produce both. Often maligned as a self-indulgent confessional poet, Plath is here retrieved as a passionate theorist. -- <i>Library Journal</i> Susan Van Dynes reading of twenty-five of Sylvia Plaths Ariel poems considers three contexts: Plaths journal entries from 1957 to 1959 (especially as they reveal her conflicts over what it meant to be a middle-class wife and mother and an aspiring writer in 1950s America); the interpretive strategies of feminist theory; and Plaths multiple revisions of the poems.