[Reading Plath's poetry, we] are continually outflanked by someone who knows what we'll approve and how we'll categorize, and is herself ready with the taxonomic words before we can get them out.

               Daddy, I have had to kill you.
               You died before I had time—

Parlor psychiatry is forestalled; she sketches the complex herself. Lady Lazarus is a bitch? It's not news to her; "I eat men like air." (I'm also the only candid person here.) Our fantasies of anarchic candor stir into life and help animate Ariel. She persuades us that she's daring to say what we wouldn't, and if we succumb to the spell we're apt to end up believing that this is what we've always wished we could say…. All her life, a reader had been someone to manipulate.

To facilitate its understanding with its reader, poetry since Homer's time has had formal ceremonies. It...