Rough Magic [antikvár]

Pretace I first read the poetry of Sylvia Plath in 1974, when I was a sophomore in college. At once, I was struck by each poem's arresting emotion, by the sheer power of its language. Over and over that semester, I read the poems I admired most—"Morning Song," "Blackberrying," "Elm," "Edge"—and was taken into a world so vividly realized that I was moved to anger, sympathy, awe. My connection with Plath did not result from any psychological identification. I was not then, nor have I ever been, suicidal. I am not a woman. My father did not die when I was eight years old. I simply fell in love with the beauty of the language of her poems. It was my admiration for Plath's work that, years later, made me want to edit Ariel Ascending, an anthology of essays about her life and writings that appeared in 1985. And it was during my research for that book that I became taken with the idea of doing Plath's biography. Before I began the writing of this book, I read in full the two major Plath archives, those housed at Smith College and those at Indiana University—and gathered information from many other university and community libraries that maintain smaller Plath holdings. I conducted some three hundred individual interviews with people who knew Plath, a number of whom had never before spoken openly about her. Though I have quoted from these interviews, I have been sparing in my use of Plath's own words—the words that made me want to write her biography. The reason is both complex and simple.