The mythology surrounding Sylvia Plath, nearly realized in The Colossus, then thoroughly solidified by the posthumous Ariel, involves implication and conjecture in terms of autobiography. The poet’s ghost has become a type, a commodity of popular culture. There are films, songs, drama and fictions based on, or inspired by the private life made into the poet’s fictions. When Ryan Adams sings the refrain of “I wish I had a Sylvia Plath” who would “ash on the carpet / and slip me a pill and / get me pretty loaded on gin”, the poet’s work gives way to fetish. The same problematic relationship of biography and work is present in the film Sylvia directed by Christine Jeffs (2003).

Some people are naturally predisposed to a dark dispossessed sexuality that is consuming of both (or all involved) lovers; in many ways this Plath-type is desirable. This dark women, or femme noir had historical roots from Helen to Medea, to Lady Mac Beth and the female addressee in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Humans instinctively fear and admire that which can consume or destroy them. And although Plath, the personality, has been ingrained in the cultural memory of the twentieth century, especially the years leading up to and including her suicide, the majority of her poems have been set aside as superfluous or difficult. However, Plath’s genius could not be contained, and however many limits her writings pushed, she has nudged her way into the cannon of High School English curriculum. The Bell Jar can be found every June in large stacks in the Required Summer Reading section of any Borders, and assuredly, by September enough people will have read it to obtain a passing mark on the first day of their next grade’s English class. Later on in the term, they will probably have to analyze “Daddy” or “Point Shirley” and the teacher can take the opportunity to point out rhyme, meter and metaphor. However, her fame, or more precisely, her notoriety overshadows the writing itself in the mind of the general public. Many people can fill in the basic information of who Plath was, often with little or no familiarity with her poems. Fifty years after its publication, though, The Colossus still retains its power to shock, move, enlighten and frustrate. The work that is mired in the life offers a grace of clarity and an economy of language, image, style that most poets are never able to achieve. Plath’s writing bubbles with something terrifying; it refuses to be ignored.

Sylvia Plath’s near-alchemic juxtaposition of words, phrases or connotations are marked by their controlling and confounding the English lyric tradition. She strived for poems that were ‘shaved close to the bone’, and The Colossus is rife with tautly constructed stanzas that feel skeletal, holding a meager amount of skin, possibly anorexic. All fat and waste in the poems are immediately disposed of:

What is gained is both a surgeon-like accuracy of image and a rapid rate of change and surprise with every turn and move the poet makes. And though these lines are intricately pared down, the focus remains on the making, the literal sleight of hand that constructs the poem. Some of Plath’s most startling moments are a result of violent line breaks, that literally break the subject or object being described, “God know how our neighbor managed to breed / His great sow” (The Sow), “And I saw white maggots coil / Thin as pins in the dark bruise / Where his innards bulged as if / He were digesting a mouse” (Medallion). The sharp breaks in language cause the poem to diverge in multiple directions, and in a sense a reader feels as though in a maze or fun house in that with every crag or turn a new surprise be it curiosity, fear or horror is waiting to jump out at them. This seems to be Plath’s greatest success, her ability to build images that stick in the reader’s mind unalterably, as if in their purest form: acerbic poison, refined as gold.

A dark ichor runs through these poem in the triumphs of her craft and content. She is able to make scenes and voices that seem real and remain so in the reader’s mind through the tricks and musicality of language. One of the most effective and memorable examples of Plath’s nervous making is “Lorelei”:

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