If we ask ourselves how Plath found a style with which to gather death and life into a single binocular view, we can reply that for her the task became specialized, since death was always before her eyes. She needed to discover a way to restore life to the skull, to put blood into the face of death, as George Herbert said. Her melodrama and violence were ways of waking Death up: to make a corpse stand up and do a striptease, to construct an ambulatory black boot over a dead foot. The sheer force of her animating will, as she breathes life into inert clay or tries to reassemble the disjecta membra of a father-Colossus, puts the poetry under a strain of energetic artificiality. The interface of life and death becomes a site of manipulated shock electrically galvanizing personified Death into...