Acclaimed translator Sarah Ruden shares a fresh, myth-busting reading of Sylvia Plath's poems, revealing the full range and towering ambition of a great American poet.

One of the leading interpreters of the poetry of antiquity at work today, Sarah Ruden has been in love with the poetry of Sylvia Plath since she was a teenager. Now she offers a profound reconsideration of Plath’s genius through deep readings of 6 of her most memorable poems. Ruden argues that Plath was a consumate mythmaker, in much the sense that the ancient Greeks were, her poems not only relating and reimagining experience, but helping us to map the very nature of experience itself.

This aspect of Plath’s achievement has too often been masked not only by the details of her life, her ill-starred marriage to Ted Hughes, and her suicide at the age of thirty, but also by the polarized opinions of her fans and her detractors. Here Ruden presents six of Plath’s greatest poems—

• “Mushrooms"
• “You’re”
• “The Babysitters”
• “The Applicant”
• “Ariel”
• “Edge”

—with accompanying close readings that reveal their astonishing beauty and rhetorical power. argue for Plath’s “enshrinement, on purely literary merit, in the cool and politically agnostic mainstream of literary greatness.”