("you stand at the blackboard"); that she attempted suicide ("at twenty I tried to die"); that she rejected the oppressiveness of his memory and overcame her guilt ("There's a stake in your fat black heart"). These may be precisely the facts that will be confirmed by the facts of Plath's biography and the feelings that will be confirmed by her journal entries. But in the poem, on the printed page, these are the facts that the poet ascribes to the speaker of the poem. There is no indication (though there is always the suspicion) that the speaker is Plath or someone very like her. Nor is there anything to indicate that this is not all a fiction. Poets have invented suicides, murderers, aviators and bee-keepers. Poets have also been all these things. But what does it add to the reading of the poem to know that these are, for the most part, details of Plath's own life? The rage in the poem is no more intense for knowing that much of it is autobiographical. But, if it is read as autobiography, the art of the poem can be more easily overlooked.
This oversight became part of the critical response of many writers when the unfortunate suicide of the poet was followed by the publication of Ariel in 1965. Ironically, it may have been Ted Hughes' own wish to avoid the autobiographical reading of the poems (as critical of himself) that gave much of the initial impetus to those who read Plath's work as martyrology rather than poetry. The poems in Ariel were prepared for publication by Plath. On her death, Hughes withdrew some work and rearranged the order of the poems. Significant work was omitted at a crucial time for the assessment of Plath's body of work but, "worse, the published Ariel destroyed the artistic pattern of Plath's manuscript (Pollitt 95).
In this new arrangement the end of the book sounded a note of "absolute despair" in which the conclusion "virtually invites the reader to luxuriate in the frisson of knowing tha...