By the autumn of 1962, Sylvia Plath was probing her connection to eternity. How would it come for her? Like an annunciation? She pondered the question in “A Birthday Present.” “My god, what a laugh” she heard the voice of immortality mocking her. This Pauline poem, with its references to veils, to what shrouds the human perception of a world elsewhere, built upon the superstructure of her fascination with what comes after death—not so much an end in itself as a transit to another realm. Death, in fact, is a seductive presence in this poem: “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.” Has the coming of death ever been more grandly welcomed than in the final three stanzas of this poem, which evoke the “deep gravity of it,” as pristine as the “cry of a baby,” as the universe slides from her side. The scene is reminiscent of Brutus falling on his sword, rendered glorious in the Greco-Roman accents of “Edge,” perhaps Plath’s last poem, resulting from her recent reading of Greek drama.

In October, Sylvia experienced a burst of inspiration resulting in two dozen of her most powerful poems. Critics have been awed by their intensity and craft, but they have not done justice to their mordant humor. Even a poem as serious and daring as “Daddy” provoked raucous laughter when Sylvia read it to Clarissa Roche. To be sure, Sylvia remained angry and sometimes confused about her broken marriage and about what to do next. She could seem hysterical, reporting that Ted had told her about his and Assia’s speculation that Sylvia would commit suicide. Could Ted Hughes be quite that cruel? William Styron has noted in Darkness Visible that clinical depression often brings on overwhelming tendencies to create melodramatic scenes that express feelings, not facts. And the onset of depression is often not detectable by the afflicted one or by others because the depressed individual continues to function—at least on a basic level. Sylvia was doing better than that. Even at her worst, she continued to write.

Depression is a mysterious disease, Styron emphasizes, and so its origins and generalizations about it are both problematical. Individuals respond to the disease … well, individually. The literature on the subject, he concludes, contains no comprehensive explanation of the disorder. Why one person survives depression and another does not is a mystery, although Plath’s poetry reveals an attitude toward death that made suicide, in certain conditions, desirable—even just.

Death and dead bodies populate her poems. In “The Detective,” written on 1 October, she spoofs the detective story’s presentation of clues and explanations that wrap up a mystery. The confident detective tells Watson that they “walk on air” with only the moon, “embalmed in phosphorus” and a “crow in a tree. Make notes.” Existence is an enigma; the evidence is evanescent. Observation is all. Clearly Plath’s droll sense of fun—fun of a very high order—had not deserted her. And this is surely what is so thrilling about her life and work: its witty persistence, no matter the impediments.

Sylvia took to beekeeping, one of her many ways of honoring her father’s memory and feeling close to him, and in the first part of October she wrote her famous sequence about an insect world that had fascinated Otto Plath. The poems, like beekeeping, provide an all-encompassing experience—surely a welcome activity for a distraught writer, who had “seen my strangeness evaporate,” as she puts it in “Stings” (6 October), finding comfort in announcing her control of “my honey-machine.” In “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” the noisy swarm becomes Shakespearean, clustering in “unintelligible syllables … like a Roman mob.” Sylvia addresses herself as the “sweet God” that will set them free. More than one friend observed a more cheerful woman, still angry, but also liberated and thriving on animosity toward Ted and the ecstasy of composing poetry. Sylvia said that working on a poem gave her greater pleasure than any other activity. She lived for it and—she eventually realized—she was willing to die for it.

The bee poems also reflect a sense of powerlessness overcome. Sylvia knew this work was a triumph, but she knew she had a long way to go. Writing to her mother on 9 October, she wanted to believe that in a return to Ireland “I may find my soul, and in London next fall, my brain, and maybe in heaven what was my heart.” The last phrase echoes what she had told a friend, that she had given Ted her heart, and there was no getting it back—not in this life anyway. Ireland, the land of her hero, Yeats, she regarded as a fount of inspiration. London was “the city,” where poetry became commerce, where Al Alvarez at The Observer, now an indispensable reader of her work, published it.

Sylvia’s letter of 9 October can be taken as a kind of relapse. “Everything is breaking,” including her dinner set and her dilapidated cottage, she told Aurelia. Even her beloved bees stung her after she had upset their sugar feeder. But in that same letter she refused her mother’s invitation to come home, to be financially supported and looked after. The daughter demurred. She had made her life in England. If she ran away, she would “never stop.” Surely this refusal was a courageous act, especially since she recognized, “I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius … I must make a life all my own as fast as I can … I am a fighter.” This was taking Ted on in his homeland, and given the superiority of the work she was now creating, her statement cannot be discounted as bravado. In retrospect, it is difficult not to see her suicide in terms of this letter, as a turning of the tables: “I shall hear of Sylvia all my life, of her success, of her genius.”

Sylvia signaled the fragile equilibrium of her life to Aurelia, expressing the hope that Warren or his wife or some other family member could come for a visit by the spring. Aurelia herself would not do—as an uncompromising Sylvia vehemently pointed out: “I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer is between us and I cannot face you again until I have a new life; it would be too great a strain.”

And so Sylvia regrouped, three days later writing her most famous poem, “Daddy.” A new life meant coming to terms with the old one. The autobiographical references are inescapable: The speaker is thirty, mentioning she was ten when her father died and twenty when she attempted a suicide that would reunite her with him; the father is German, and like the pontificating Otto, stands before a blackboard; a heavy marble statue has one gray toe (one thinks of Otto’s amputated leg). And, of course, the poem definitively addresses the longing to recover a father who presided with such authority over his household that he seemed, as the poem has it, “a bag full of God.” Anyone reading Sylvia’s vituperative letters about Ted would be hard put not to identify him as one of the poem’s “brutes.”

“Daddy” reverberates with twentieth-century history, especially echoes of the Second World War, and reflects the poet’s desire to imprint herself on world-shaping events—to insert herself into history like one of those Jews sent off to concentration camps. The child who vowed when her father died that she would never speak to God again includes a father in her list of rejected authority figures. Only by forsaking what she has loved and yearned for can she be her own person. The image of the victim identifying with her persecutor, the “panzer-man,” anticipates the thesis Hannah Arendt’s propounded a year later in “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” (Eichmann was put on trial on 11 April 1961, more than a year before “Daddy” was conceived, and he was executed on 31 May 1962, a little more than four months before the poem’s composition.) As critic Judith Kroll points out, Plath also anticipates Susan Sontag’s analysis of fascist aesthetics—especially the desire to exalt “two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.”