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."