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have, but I’m still bitching, so maybe not.
    What would happen when women told their side of the story? Would the world split open? In a way, it did. And most of the results were sanguine. Fatherhood was liberated. Men can now admit they like being close to their kids. Women can admit they don’t always. Life is less rigid. Women earn money. Men cook. Women say how much they hate housework. They are not ashamed to order out. They are not afraid of fantasy. They admit to having sexual dreams and feeling pure lust. They have sex with the occasional demon just for the fun of it. They have sex with their girlfriends and don’t make a federal case out of it. Even the ones who want to stay home with their babies know they have choices.
    I survived to have the last laugh. Keats notwithstanding, book reviews can’t kill. Many of the men and women who were terrified by Fear of Flying have either gone silent or convinced themselves they always loved the book.
    Now the girls of my daughter’s generation have size-twelve feet and booming voices. They all have BlackBerries and Treos. They text-message their funky desires to their lovers. They read my books and think: Why did my mother hide this from me? It’s not that raunchy at all.
     
     
    We conveniently forget that Sylvia Plath was not known until 1963, when she was already dead. Her entire public career was posthumous. Had she lived, would her poems have had the same appeal? Or was the bloody fingerprint on the page part of the allure? An unanswerable question. We want to know great poems have great consequences—for their authors and their readers.
    When I was at Barnard, my writing teacher, the poet Robert Pack, used to talk about our response to works of art with this parable: “Suppose you see a canvas with a red slash across it and nothing more. You look at it and wonder what you think of it. Then suppose someone tells you that the artist cut off his right hand and made that crimson gash—does it change your view?”
     
     
    In The New Yorker magazine of August 3, 1963, a remarkable sequence of poems appeared. They were by a poet whose name was not yet familiar to readers but whose voice sounded like no other. Under these poems was the intriguing attribution: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Since there was no Contributors section in Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, readers had no idea who the author of these astonishing poems might be. Her name was followed by the ominous double dates confirming that the author was no longer on this sad planet. She had gone, like Alcestis, to the Land of the Dead.
    The sequence began with “Two Campers in Cloud Country” and ended with “The Moon and the Yew Tree.”
    This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
    The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
    The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God ...
    I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
    No one reading these poems could doubt that their author was more than “half in love with easeful death,” as Keats had it. But then young poets are always in love with death and in love with love. This one was only thirty when she died.
    I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
    Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
    Inside the church, the saints will all be blue, Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
    The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
    And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.
    The impact these poems had is almost unimaginable now. In 1963, we still had a literary culture. Reading poems to oneself was not as rare as it is today (despite all the poetry slams and hip-hop jams). To young women who wrote poetry, these poems were galvanizing. Sylvia, whoever she was, had a fully evolved voice. Not wry and reeking of the bittersweet twenties like Dorothy Parker’s or romantic/ironic/transcendentalist like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s. Perhaps some of