Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness

Rating:
Summary: Stunning achievement
Review: A stunning achievement written with a steadfast hand invoking Hitchcockian detail, dramatic irony, and dread. Edward Butscher returns the reader to the source - Plath's collection of poetry, The Bell Jar, and her entire work. With Butscher's insight into Plath's "extended suicide note", balloons will never be the same.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning achievement
Review: A stunning achievement written with a steadfast hand invoking Hitchcockian detail, dramatic irony, and dread. Edward Butscher returns the reader to the source - Plath's collection of poetry, The Bell Jar, and her entire work. With Butscher's insight into Plath's "extended suicide note", balloons will never be the same.

Rating:
Summary: Works on Every Level
Review: Fascinating and detailed, I read this substantial book everywhere: standing on the subway, seated on the bus, reclined on my couch, hidden under my desk, waiting at stoplights. It is beautifully written, informative in the extreme and enlightening about the ambition, drive, commitment and discipline that goes into the making of a star poet (or writer).

The author is a wordsmith who truly understands, and helps the reader to understand, the creative process and the poetic voice. I did not want the book to end but still found myself rushing toward the denouement of Plath's last days as if the book were a mystery novel and, hoping against hope, the culprit or victim might yet be someone else. Butscher brilliantly connects all the dots including Plath's state of mind and the significance of the timing of her poems.

My caveats are: Ted Hughes remains a less well developed figure against the glowing Sylvia. I would have liked a more developed portrait of the much maligned Ted. I still don't know how tall Hughes was (nor Sylvia for that matter), what women found attractive about him, how he came to be a poet, etc. Butscher relies heavily on a Freudian analysis of Plath's motivations for almost every twist and turn of her brilliant but blighted existence. I find mother-blame just too done! Read the book though!