SOURCE: "On Sylvia Plath," in Raritan, Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 1-10.

In the following essay, Hughes comments on Plath's struggle to transcribe her private anguish into the fiction of The Bell Jar. According to Hughes, Plath's difficulty stemmed from her effort to produce a novel with both mythic aspirations and cathartic ritual based in reality.

Sylvia Plath's intense ambition to write a novel provides one of the main and most distressful themes of her early journals. Her inability to start—or worse, her various attempts to start—brought her repeatedly to near despair. She agonized about style, tone, structure, subject matter.

Throughout that same period, her poetry struggled into being against only slightly less resistance. Plenty of poems survive, perhaps because each of her convulsive efforts to break through the mysterious barriers by way of verse sufficed to complete a short poem—which could then be sold for...