During the past year or so, Sylvia Plath has become a true cult figure. At this writing, the Savile Book Shop in Georgetown, D.C. has a huge window dis play in which copies of The Colossus, The Bell Jar, Ariel, and Crossing the Water encircle a large photograph of Sylvia Plath, which rests against a copy of A. Alvarez's The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, that ultimate tribute to Sylvia Plath as our Extremist Poet par excellence. In the face of such publicity, the poems themselves become almost

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... an irrele vancy in the search for the real Sylvia Plath, the Laingian heroine behind the mask of beautiful, brilliant, super-efficient Smith girl, who married the most admired British poet of our time. Yet in the long run it is, of course, the poetry Faber and Faber, 1971).