When "Ariel" Was New: Early Critical Essays About Sylvia Plath

I got a hard copy of the earliest compilation of Sylvia Plath criticism, the journal Tri-Quarterly No. 7,  Fall 1966. This "Womanly Issue" devotes 50 pages to essays about Sylvia Plath's Ariel, written by male critics and a poet we can see were good at their jobs. It was generous, bold, even avant-garde for editor Charles Newman to dedicate an issue to female writers, although we can see from the issue's cover that even smart men when they pictured "women" pictured them naked.

Yet they were bowled over and rightly so by Ariel, published in the U.S. that May. Just inside is a full-page ad for Ariel. Would it persuade you to buy a book of poems by a dead female most people had never heard of? Maybe if you subscribed to Tri-Quarterly. Ariel's publishers really must hand it to Robert Lowell -- then a high-profile, public American poet -- for his rousing introduction, from an Ariel review. [1][2][3]

The issue reprints eighteen Sylvia Plath poems, starting with "The Death of Mythmaking" (1959) and "Sow" (1957) and ending with "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," and "Words." There's also the earliest printing of Ted Hughes's essay "The Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems." A. Alvarez presented an essay written "partly as a tribute and and partly as an attempt to to show how those last strange poems might be read," and argued that Plath inflicted suffering upon herself -- covering for the fellow male who inflicted most of the suffering, and adding to the essay a headnote and endnote which is what you have to do when you lie.

Lois Ames and Anne Sexton contributed biographical, not critical, Plath essays. Ames, then Plath's official biographer, quoted from Plath's letters and journals as no one else then was able to, and from some sources I cannot now trace. To round out the "Womanly Issue," poet Richard Howard contributed five separate, warmly worded prose appreciations of the works of Isabella Gardner, Denise Levertov, Carolyn Kizer (a darned good poet; Pulitzer 1985), May Swenson, and Susan Sontag, with full-page photos of their photogenic faces.

Newman collected the Tri-Quarterly essays and more in a book I like, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (1970). Appended are a valuable study, by Mary Kinzie, of the earliest U.K. and U.S. Ariel reviews, and facsimile drafts of the poem "Thalidomide." Newman was born and died in St. Louis and from the 1980s was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, but between 1988 and his death in 2006 no one there saw hide nor hair of him.

Tri-Quarterly digitized the issue and it may be read here.  

[1] Lowell, Robert, "On Two Poets," New York Review of Books, 12 May 1966.

[2] See different Ariel covers, U.S. and U.K., pictured and parsed in the course blog Technologies of Text, n.d.

[3] Two of the three blurbs appear only in this ad. The one from Robert Penn Warren reads: "A unique book -- it scarcely seems a book at all, rather a keen, cold gust of reality as if somebody had knocked out a window pane on a brilliant night. It is a plangent, painful book, with all the pain translated into beauty, nothing less." Anne Sexton's blurb reads, "I am very moved. These last poems stun me." The third blurb, from The Times Literary Supplement, would become familiar: "One of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."

Sweetly Picking Up Pieces

Here's a note from Sylvia Plath to her mother Aurelia Plath, dated by Aurelia 18 July 1962. Sylvia in this note was telling Aurelia how to feed and care for Frieda and Nick at Court Green, and manage Sylvia's housekeeper Nancy Axworthy while Sylvia was away on business.

Sylvia's note is "real nice" considering she'd banished houseguest Aurelia during the week of July 9, telling her to find a hotel. Not finding a room, Aurelia had by July 14 moved in with Sylvia's midwife Winifred Davies. Yet Aurelia was asked to visit daily to serve Sylvia as a free babysitter and cook. As much as Sylvia hated hosting her mother, Aurelia hated to babysit Sylvia, who reacting to her husband's cheating howled with grief and drove her car off the road, was so shattered and out-of-control that the local doctor prescribed tranquilizers. [1] In turn, Winifred Davies gave Aurelia a sleep aid. 

The above note was tucked into Aurelia's 1962 diary at the appropriate page and photographed in situ. It is part of Aurelia Plath's literary estate, which along with Warren Plath's literary estate was donated by the Plath family in February 2025 to Yale University's Beinecke Library. Its archivists are currently processing the donated materials. The note ends, "Love, Sivvy."

[1] Sylvia to Ruth Beuscher, 20 July 1962: "got the doctor to knock me out for 8 hours after a week of no eating or sleeping" 

Cultural Debris in Aurelia Plath's Archives

Meet Aurelia Plath's Joys of Jell-O cookbook (1962). Among her last effects and sharing a packing box with Great Short Stories of the World, this volume testifies to how, with one-quarter of a stomach, Aurelia lived days, weeks, and months on fruit-flavored gelatin mixed with whatever she could tolerate. Featured recipes include "Ring-Around-the-Tuna Salad" and the timeless "Broken Glass" dessert.

What's cultural debris? The leavings and tag ends of fads and fashions inconsistent with the level of discourse. Aurelia Plath's papers have few such items. She never mentions pop music or coffee brands or her era's entertainers. Only one fad really swept her away:

To Linda Wagner-Martin, 9 December 1985

 

 

In Aurelia's copy of "Bumblebees and Their Ways"

Aurelia Plath to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia started in the 1970s drawing "smiley faces" next to written or printed remarks, a pox-like American habit now faded but not extinct. The sun-colored "smiley" symbol that in the '70s defaced every manner of consumer item lived on to sire the whole emoji tribe. On a Christmas 1965 letter from Ted Hughes, Aurelia drew a "sad face" because Ted had canceled her upcoming annual visit with her grandchildren. (He wasn't ready to explain Assia Wevill's baby.) Aurelia drew that teary "sad face" on Ted's letter well after first reading it, because she used a type of marker not available in 1965.

Aurelia to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia had to explain "Paper from granddaughters" because the image was so uncomfortably inconsistent with who she was. Artist Bernard Kliban (1935-1990) drew tabby-cat cartoons printed by the millions on stationery, greeting cards, and tee-shirts ("Love to eat them mousies. . .") and the Kliban Cat still has fans. Of the examples of cultural debris in Aurelia's papers, the popularity of this nameless solitary cat (never a comic strip character, never animated) most defies political analysis. 

What else? Aurelia tried to quote in Letters Home Khalil Gibran's famous prose poem, "On Children" ("Your children are not your children"), made mawkish by overuse. Her editor stopped her. Online you will find a quotation from the popular prose poem Desiderata("You are a child of the universe") credited to either Sylvia or to Aurelia. Aurelia had quoted the poem in a letter to Sylvia, who liked it enough to quote it in her journal. [1]

Sylvia Plath on the other hand practically drowned in cultural debris, reading formulaic stories in women's magazines, in New York City vomiting beautifully sculpted food, and while wearing queerly-cut dresses watched food stylists using toothpicks to prop up melting scoops of ice cream.

[1] Journals, 27 February 1956. "Desiderata" (1927), an inspirational work by Max Ehrmann, was ever more widely quoted and reprinted in the 1960s and 1970s as a sort of creed for the counterculture.

How the "Letters Home" Playwright Changed the World

Montage from The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett, 1984

Imagine living in a time and place when it was legal and even good to beat your wife.

Sylvia and Aurelia Plath lived in that patriarchs' paradise, and their husbands abused them. We find this horrifying. But domestic abuse was common, and a victim's speaking out was called "He said she said" and was therefore nothing. Until.

Playwright and screenwriter Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote the TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). It was the first really raw and bloody TV portrayal of a battered wife tried for murdering her husband. More than 50 million people watched its premiere. [1] The result: criminalization, in the U.S., of domestic violence and marital rape. The latter, considered a separate issue, became illegal in all 50 states in 1993. The federal Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, has since updated its language and scope.

Before The Burning Bed, if police saw no violence they didn't make arrests. Clergy counseled married women despite broken jaws and shiners to remember their vow to honor their men. Shelters for women and children were few. There were some domestic-violence phone helplines. A 1-800 number appeared at the movie's end. Tens of thousands phoned that evening.

Rose Leiman Goldemberg

Goldemberg died July 21 at age 97. Her link with Sylvia Plath is her adaptation of Letters Home, a selection from Sylvia's letters edited by her mother Aurelia Plath. The two-character play debuted in New York in 1979, went to London and Paris and onward, and there is a very good closed-captioned French-language film of it (1986). Goldemberg earned Aurelia Plath's trust with a staged reading in Warren Plath's living room. Aurelia received 50 percent of each production's profits and letters document the women's friendship. But Goldemberg had to move on to her next book, play, or movie. She wrote a lot of each. [2]

As with The Burning Bed, Goldemberg often dramatized biographies and hustled to sell her scripts and see them produced. In the 1980s all three commercial television networks aired prime-time made-for-TV movies. All rejected the Burning Bed. They said no big female star wanted to appear disheveled and bruised to play a battered wife and mother. Except Farrah Fawcett. Fetishized for her pin-up photo and iconic hairdo, Fawcett had left what was called "jiggle TV" for gritty roles in off-Broadway plays such as Extremities. She gave a performance so memorable people still watch it.

Hollywood actors then asked Goldemberg to write them similar star vehicles with serious themes. She wrote Stone Pillow (1985), about a homeless woman, for Lucille Ball. All three networks then exploded with TV movies exposing the harm done by incest, stalking, parental kidnapping, and psychiatric treatment, which Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar had made a women's issue. These TV movies are now on YouTube and exist because women writers had and used their nerve.

Success felt strange. In a note to herself written two weeks before Letters Home premiered, Goldemberg, temporarily away from home, 1) longed to talk with Aurelia but didn't want to burden her and 2) felt insecure, yet exhilarated. "I am fifty, and old enough to know something," she mused. "Do we keep discovering?" [3]

Some of Goldemberg's earlier plays now seem dated. The Plath play was her only international hit. She wrote novels and screenplays few people ever heard of. It is easy for writers to think that a life spent writing what they were moved to write was mostly wasted.

Note to self: It never is. 

[1] "Francine Hughes Wilson," New York Times obituary 31 March 2017, says 75 million.

[21 See roseleimangoldemberg.com, her New York Times obituary (30 July 2025), and a full-length interview with Goldemberg (2011) opening with a discussion of The Burning Bed, on YouTube.com.

[3] "Thoughts at Barbara's typewriter," 12 September 1979, Rose Leiman Goldemberg Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.

 Actor Doris Belack, Letters Home's original "Aurelia," and Aurelia Plath at the American Place Theater, New York, September 1979. (That's not Sylvia's necklace.)