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."

Rosalind Constable is Why You Are Reading This: Time Magazine's "Ariel" Review

Screen grab from Constable's Warhol screen test, 1964

 

Perhaps you’ve read it:

 

On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open. The dead woman was Sylvia Plath, 30, an American poet whose marriage to Ted Hughes, a British poet, had gone on the rocks not long before. . . .

 

But within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. . . . 

 

So begins the review of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel in Time magazine (June 10, 1966; on newsstands June 6). From this unsigned work, the first Ariel review for America’s general public, Plathdom as we know it unfolded. The national newsweekly’s paid circulation was then 3.3 million, newsstand sales 4 million, its worldwide readership 17 million, the 1966 equivalent of going viral; The New York Times and its Book Review had not one-tenth its reach. Time reprinted alongside of the Ariel review the poem “Daddy” in full, and family photos lent by Aurelia Plath.

 

The author was British-born Rosalind Constable (1907-1995), Time’s arts-and-culture correspondent from 1948 to 1967. A talented trendspotter, her reports on the avant-garde helped nudge the edgiest art and artists toward the middle. She wrote for Fortune, The New Yorker, Vogue, Life (Time’s sister publication), Esquire, New York, and Saturday Review. She was friends with Andy Warhol and championed Pop artists. From 1940 she scouted out new artists for gallery owner Betty Parsons, who launched the Abstract Expressionists, and Constable in the 1950s was rebel novelist Patricia Highsmith’s crush.

 

Time’s juicy Ariel review set a trend. Three generations of Plath criticism, highbrow and low, aped this review's narrative architecture, almost helplessly leading with Plath’s suicide followed by a capsule biography. Then, if only to slight it, critics referenced “Daddy,” a poem that in 2021 is just past being interpreted literally. In 1966 this review established “Daddy” as  Plath’s flagship poem and Plath’s father as the core Plath preoccupation -- until the year 2020 when Heather Clark’s Plath biography Red Comet suggested that regarding Otto Plath “myth has overshadowed truth.” This review made Plath’s head in the oven her life’s most basic fact.

 

Constable used advantageously her British sources, reporting that in Britain Ariel, published in March 1965, had sold 15,000 copies in ten months. (Here are the publisher's original sales reports showing that number is greatly exaggerated.) The Time review also recycled from Britain into the international mainstream crippling buzzwords from a year’s worth of snooty British Ariel reviews: “sick,” “morbid,” “psychotic,” “confessional.” Constable had read The Bell Jar, not available in the U.S.; this enhanced the review's authority and snark. She found and interviewed a witness to Plath’s pathetic final weekend. In March 1966 she interviewed Aurelia Plath in Wellesley.

 

Aurelia had thought Constable’s phone voice “pleasant,” but in person Constable took no notes and asked questions so invasive that Aurelia would not answer. (1) The review is unsigned, and Constable, although she had an office at Time-Life, is not on Time’s masthead, but Aurelia named Constable in a letter and later wrote that only she could have told Constable that three-year-old Sylvia, sighting a bumblebee, would say “Bombus bimaculatus,” a statement the review styled as that of an attention-seeking Daddy’s girl.

 

Time magazine today is of interest only because of its past and because its cover photo makes its subject a celebrity. Plath quoted from Time in a letter dated 11 September 1950. The Bell Jar, set in 1953, described withered copies of Time and Life lying on a coffee table. Let another poet attest to the power and ubiquity of Time (founded in 1923) during its midcentury heyday. In 1956 Allen Ginsberg wrote, addressing America:  

 

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?   

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 

 

Even Time’s covers, with their familiar red borders, made news. The April 8, 1966 cover stunned and riled the readership, baldly asking “Is God Dead?” Time once forged and ruined reputations. In one bruising review that sounds a bit envious, it made Sylvia Plath a household name. (2)

 

1. Aurelia Schober Plath to Olwyn Hughes, March 7, 1966: “The day after your letter arrived, I had a long-distance call from New York and heard Mrs. Rosalind Constable’s pleasant voice for the first time. She is coming to Wellesley this next weekend.” ASP to Ted Hughes, March 29, 1966: “Mrs. Rosalyn [sic] Constable, the reporter and writer of the article on Sylvia for LIFE INTERNATIONAL was here over a week ago . . .  She took no notes to speak of . . .” ASP to Ted Hughes, July 6, 1966: “Only two words from my tapes occur [in the review] and identify the author: Bombus bimaculatus -- and then they are used in such a way as to be utterly ridiculous.” ASP to Miriam Baggett, July 7, 1966: “Last March, when confronted by a reporter (an English woman), I refused to accept her invitation to develop a very disparaging remark .  . . She did not need to sign this brutal, malicious article in TIME; her fingerprint is there unmistakably . . . her revenge.” [ellipsis in original]. 

Read the original review, “The Blood Jet is Poetry,” Time, June 10, 1966, 118-120.