‘The Occult Sylvia Plath’
By Julia Gordon-Bramer
Destiny Books, 416 pages

‘The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath’
Edited by Peter K. Steinberg
Faber & Faber, 848 pages

‘Sylvia Plath: A Very Short Introduction”
By Heather Clark
Oxford University Press, 144 pages

The reason why there are so many books about Sylvia Plath (not just biographies) is that she is multitudinous. So often misidentified as a confessional poet, she actually lived and wrote in the tradition of Walt Whitman, who used “Song of Myself” as a starting point to explore the universe of humanity: “The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them. /And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. . . . I am large, I contain multitudes.”

A title like “The Occult Sylvia Plath” may arouse suspicions of some kind of esoteric study, not a full-fledged biography, and that is what Julia Gordon-Bramer offers: a close reading of the events in Plath’s life — familiar, of course, to readers of Plath biographies — now viewed from the angle of a Plath scholar and a professional tarot reader.  

In effect, what Ms. Gordon-Bramer provides is a portrait of a writer who practiced outreach, unwilling to confine herself to an empirical world, and willing to entertain a mystical knowledge of what cannot be seen and yet can be summoned by the imagination — a belief she shared with powerful poets such as her husband, Ted Hughes, and W.B. Yeats. When she chose her last London residence, she saw her choice as ratified in a passage from one of Yeats’s plays.

Ms. Gordon-Bramer has scoured Plath’s annotations of books, and examined again the influence of Hughes and his belief in magic and in astrology. Some readers will no doubt balk at this biographer’s readings of certain poems, contending she goes too far, finding implications in words she believes have mystic significance. 

Pay attention, though, to the overall picture of what is demonstrated in Plath’s openness to the world, to Whitman’s invocation of how the past and present converge and “wilt,” as he engorges himself with the lives of others that he feeds back into himself. So it was with Plath, who was anything but an introverted writer, who functioned, for example, as a hustling reporter while still an undergraduate at Smith College.

No book has done justice to Plath’s journalism, which gets crowded out by more important work in poetry and prose, yet without that sense of her being attuned to current affairs, something has been lost in the appreciation of her sensibility. This has now been restored to our attention in the volume of collected prose that has been assembled by the assiduous Peter K. Steinberg.

Now we are able to read Plath’s earliest prose, such as “Hike to Lowell River” (1943), “Junior High Briefs” (1946), and a high school essay, “The Atomic Threat” (1948). Included as well are many pieces she wrote as a journalist while attending Smith College, and many works of fiction including such scary stuff as “The Mummy’s Tomb” (1946) and “The Island: A Radio Play” (1948). These were excluded from the fiction collection edited not so well by Hughes, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” (1979). 

So, may we assume we now have the complete Plath? Hardly. In her Fulbright years at Cambridge University, she produced a series of essays about the corpus of Western literature, ranging from Plato to St. Augustine to D.H. Lawrence. These essays, some of which I discuss in a forthcoming book, “The Making of Sylvia Plath,” have yet to be collected or discussed in the published literature about Plath. The comprehensive intellectual biography of Plath has yet to be written; when it does it will have to reckon with her copious annotations of what she read. Julia Gordon-Bramer’s scrutiny of Plath’s library — much of it housed at Smith College — is just the beginning of what is to come.

In the meantime, Heather Clark has distilled the work of her major biography of Plath, “Red Comet,” into a succinct survey of Plath’s life, poetry, and prose, showing, as well, how she should be viewed in the context of modern poetry and the so-called confessional poets. A discussion of Plath in relation to feminism, politics, and mental illness figures into an understanding of this influential and protean writer. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of five books about Sylvia Plath.