Critics still talk of Sylvia Plath as a suicidal poet: a poet whose suicide was the more or less inevitable putting into action of values and attitudes actually endorsed in her poetry. A critic can go so far astray, for example, as Richard Howard in Alone with America (and Howard is by no means as extreme as some) and claim that ‘the very source of Sylvia Plath’s creative energy was her self-destructiveness’.¹ As evidence of this, Howard mentions ‘Tulips’ (Ariel, p. 20),² saying that this poem, together with her other late poems, displays ‘the pride of an utter and ultimate surrender’.³ But it is a strange surrender that says

I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.