Sylvia Plath's suicide was like no other American poet's. Hart Crane's dissolution at the bottom of the Caribbean suited one who was in love with the sea, but the poems themselves, emblematic of a poet who wanted to incarnate the American myth, did not directly point to that end. All of Sylvia Plath's work, we can now see, was a prologue to disaster, to "last words," phrases "born all of a piece. . . poems...
(more)