[The Bell Jar is a] poet's novel, a casebook almost in stanzas, each episode brief, brittle, encapsulated. The past consists of 'Atoms that cripple', minute totalities of pain which spill out separately. They lack the essential sprawl and waste of the novel. The progress from one to another is poetic too, less in time than in image. Whatever scene is settled upon, is drawn up to its sharpest point, until it hurts. And yet, the disparate scenes gather congruity. They lean forward, crowding closer together in the momentum of madness; then slowly and less successfully they move back upward, against expectation, to a second sanity.

The method is nervous, a formalized jerkiness rather like Dorothy Richardson's, but without her gasps and flutters. This instability is plain, awkward, laughable. The girl's words make fun of her own ingenuous disorder. The Bell Jar is perhaps closest to a poem like...