"A rare random descent was to strike Sylvia Plath often in poems that were fastidious in her choice of words, perceptive in their handling of metaphor and simile. The wonder of it all was her ability to keep imagery working for the poem and not against it. Her poems resist line extractions, build steadily, word by word, image by image."

William F. Claire

CLC vol . 17 p347

"The stillness and purity of death sometimes present themselves as the only riposte to the horror of man's being a creature that dies"

Francis Hope

id p346

"Many of the poems are hasty, sometims prosy, sometimes over-imaged, with connections tenuous or non-existent-a number are unintelligible."

Eleanor Ross Taylor

id p347

"There is a peculiar, haunting challenge to these poems. Probably many, after reading Ariel, will recoilfrom their first overawed shock, and painfully wonder why so much of it leaves them feeling empty, evasive and inarticulate. In her lines I hear the serpent whisper, 'Come , if only you had the courage, you too could have my rightness, audacity and ease of inspiration.' These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.... And yet Sylvia Plath's poems are not the celebration of some savage and debauched existence.... This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it."

Robert Lowell

id p347

(From Introduction to Ariel)

"Sylvia Plath always seems to be describing her self-destruction as an exhillarating act of contempt."

"The suicide of a young woman with the highest gifts is inevitably a circumstance of the most moving and dramatic sort. We cannot truly separate the work from the fascination and horror of the death."

Elizabeth Hardwick

id p357

"She could have done without that voodoo encouragement. It's too much to ay that the poems killed her, but one can't see that they did anything to keep her alive. The death poems- say a third of Ariel - are bad for anyone's soul. They give a look of literary repectability to voyeurist passions: no gain for poetry, nor for her ."

Hugh Kenner

Gunton, Sharon, ed. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 17. Detroit: Gale Research, 1981: 344-69.