When Sylvia Plath appears on college syllabi today, what follows is depressingly predictable: She becomes either a martyr for patriarchy or a case study in mental instability. What’s lost in this ideological tug-of-war is any serious consideration of her formidable craftsmanship. Sarah Ruden’s incisive study of Plath, I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, aims to correct this imbalance, redirecting our attention from biography to artistry with the precision of an ar...
