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Title: Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath by Judith Kroll ISBN: 0-06-012457-1 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: November, 1976 Format: Hardcover List Price(USD): $13.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)

Rating: 3
Summary: helpful
Comment: this book was extremely helpful to me while in school. The book didn't strike me in the same way it did the last person, but, then, I didn't read it cover to cover. One thing I do remember about Kroll's book was that she expressed the belief that it was a mistake or an injustice to simply read Plath's poetry as a suicide note or as something tangible left in evidence at a crime scene, like a blood stain or a chalk outline. I agree--while Plath was a confessional poet, she was different from Sexton and Lowell and the like in that she created a mythological world in which she cast her speaker as the lead. There are symbolic cycles, colors, characters, elements of re-birth, etc that would not be present if that were the case. So while some people read Plath's poetry as tangible proof of mental illness or the need for feminism or whatever, Kroll reinforced the idea that there was another level to her poetry--a mythological one. That was what I gathered from my use of the book. I felt that Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame had the Olwyn Hughes-informed subjectivity though. But then, that was biography, not a study on her poetry...

Rating: 3
Summary: critique on images in Plath's poetry...
Comment: One of the theories of Plath's work presented in Knoll's book "Chapters in a Mythology" is that Plath's poems reflect the struggle between Plath's warring "true" and "false" selves. In the same way, Knoll seems to be trying to serve to masters when writing her book. She writes of working closely and very well with the Hughes estate, something which is almost unheard of, considering most critics and biographer's of Plath only come head-to-head against the estate's manipulation and tight grasp on the rights to Plath's works. One arguement is that too much of her work is being transformed into a feminist liberation cause that Plath herself never took up.

For Knoll, the temptation to put in some feminist criticism was too great, as it sneaks in here and there, as she deconstructs such poems as "Rabbit Catcher" and "Moon and the Yew Tree" in the way in which the Hughes estate sees fit, sneaking in feminist thinking between the lines. What comes through ends up being a muddied critique with conflicting ideas trying to support themselves with the same evidence at hand. Knoll, like Plath, was trying to server to masters in the authorship of this book. However, unlike her subject, Knoll was unable to sucessfully convey the meaning sufficantly for either side.