I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems by Sarah Ruden.
The Library of America, 2025.
116 pages. $22.

Reviewed by Amanda Auchter

It has been over sixty years since the death of Sylvia Plath, and in that time, there have been an abundance of biographies, critical analyses, novels, songs, and even a movie written about the famous poet, who ended her life on February 11, 1963. It would seem everything about Plath has already been said, but then comes along Sarah Ruden’s slim nonfiction work, I Am the Arrow: The Life & Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, which takes a fresh, novel approach to Plath’s biography, work, and legacy. 

Ruden, a notable translator and interpreter of ancient literature, brings this experience, in part, to make the argument that Plath is a more classical hero than simply an archetype of 1950s culture or an amalgam of early feminist representation. In Arrow, Ruden choses six key poems that constitute both the poet’s biographical landscape as well as the development of her work’s unique and powerful voice. The idea of creating an entire biography from six poems in itself is fascinating and curious but also leaves room for moments of uneven discourse and critical leaps mixed with personal interjections. Ruden chooses the six poems from the years 1959 (“Mushrooms”), 1960 (“You’re”), 1961 (“The Babysitters”), 1962 (“The Applicant” and “Ariel”), and finally, 1963 (“Edge.”). It is interesting to note that some of Plath’s most famous poems, such as “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” her bee series, or even “Morning Song,” one of her most tender poems about motherhood, have been omitted from this biographical and critical work. 

In her introduction, Ruden states that, “Plath both created and embodied the Homeric or Vergilian myth of womanhood, of the hero who has been to the underworld and seeing the unspeakable realities, yet speaks of them” (12). Ruden goes on to discuss over the course of the six poems how the record of Plath’s work exhibits how even though her life tragically ended at age thirty, her work and the mythos surrounding her biography has endured.  Ruden claims that due to the subject material addressed by Plath – womanhood, patriarchal stereotypes and roles, child rearing, depression – she has become the Lady Godiva of sorts, who rides unclothed through the village for all to see her wounds (95). 

“Mushrooms,” Ruden asserts, speaks to the power of women, the once-quiet nurturers, who, by their sheer force, will, almost Biblically, inherit the earth. Ruden sees this poem, the first discussed in the book, as a “breakthrough” where Plath begins to “make herself into art,” which will eventually “make that art part us” (24).

This notion of Plath making herself into art is controversial and a reference to the belief as expressed by Dido Merwin, ex-wife of famed poet W.S. Merwin, and one-time good friend of Plath and Hughes, said in the 1988 documentary series, Voices and Visions, that Plath was, “creating the situation in which she would write Ariel. She needed to be that amount of destructive of both herself and everything that mattered in order to get to the raw material of Ariel.”

As Plath scholars now acknowledge, this belief is false, tinged with misogyny, and in the case of Dido Merwin, stunningly biased. However, Ruden’s commentary throughout I Am the Arrow, is uneven; on one hand, she praises Plath’s work as a means of shrugging off the 1950s and early 1960s beliefs of the way women should be (i.e. “the angel in the house”) and instead, such as in poems like “You’re,” present “a buoyant defiance of peril,” innovative in the way that she “had to make motherhood something else, something unusual, both in reality and on paper, because she saw no yet-existing place in it where she could rest”(44).

On the other, Ruden relies on the internalized misogyny that still clouds the mythology of Plath’s personae some sixty years on, acknowledging, “these are just my speculative impressions” (34). 

While much of biography and criticism does rely on a form of “speculative impression,” Ruden’s brand, at times, tends toward the biased,  judgmental, voice. For example, Ruden writes, “[d]uring the period when her genius flowered […] Plath took a preoccupying interest in feelings and ideas about the mind, at the cost of actions such as getting her painful partner out of her life for good” (74). Moreover, Ruden, whose central thesis relies heavily of the immortality of Plath’s work, claims of Plath’s tragic death that “I would claim the “suicide” the painful, terrifying, thrilling, irrevocable gift of her life to her writing; and I would call the release the speaker [of “Ariel”] feels not the peace of death, but the confidence of immortality” (102).

Despite the callous claim that Plath’s suicide (even in the mode of her “Ariel” speaker) is a “gift of her life to her writing,”  Ruden’s discourse is at her best when she compares and contrasts Plath’s poems and biography with the characters and beliefs of classical and antiquarian works, as in “Edge.”  Ruden writes that the poem (often considered the last one written during Plath’s life) mirrors thematically to Euripides’s Medea and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (109). In this, as Ruden notes several times throughout I Am the Arrow, that Plath’s strengths lie in the fact that she “produced memorable images of the poet as a permanent, looming, artifact” in which she “turning her body, her mind, her experiences, her self into rooted, weighty objects” (9). Ruden’s I Am the Arrow is a weighty look at Plath’s life through the lens of a slim handful of poems, but allows enough room for the reader to consider the greatness and lasting immortality of a midcentury woman, a mother, a poet whose work, ultimately is “a lesson in hope, in the possibility of things not being ended, in their enduring against all odds” (19).

Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her writing appears in publications such as Alaska Quarterly Review, HuffPost, CNN, Black Warrior Review, Shenandoah, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, among others. She holds holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College and is a contributing reviewer for Rhino and Indianapolis Review. She lives in Houston, TX.

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