Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. The selection, running from 1959 until six days before Plath’s famous suicide in 1963, consists of “Mushrooms,” “You’re,” “The Babysitters,” “The Applicant,” “Ariel,” and “Edge.” Working with the conceit that Plath conceived herself in her poetry as a classical heroine, Ruden argues for her “establishment, on purely literary merit, in the cool mainstream of literary greatness.” Plath’s poetry is concerned with immortality and myth, with myth defined as claims about “the nature of experience” which allow even people with quiet lives to participate in grandeur.
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