One of our leading interpreters of ancient literature, acclaimed translator Sarah Ruden (the Aeneid) has long had a passion for Sylvia Plath’s poetry. In I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, she offers a profound reconsideration of Plath’s genius. Ruden argues that Plath is more than a consummate mythmaker; the poet herself takes on the role of the classical hero: striving, suffering, descending to an underworld that threatens meaninglessness and despair, and returning to speak the previously unspoken. For the first time, a writer and a woman becomes that hero.

For Ruden, this achievement, like the deep learning and driving ambition that fueled it, has been overshadowed by the sensational and tragic details of Plath’s life, especially her ill-starred marriage to British poet Ted Hughes and her suicide at the age of thirty. Ruden offers a much-needed corrective through close readings of six poems—“Mushrooms,” “You’re,” “The Babysitters,” “The Applicant,” “Ariel,” and “Edge”—that reveal how Plath persisted in the face of illness to produce works of disquieting beauty and uncanny power.

Inviting us to read these poems afresh, Ruden makes the case for Plath’s “enshrinement, on purely literary merit, in the cool mainstream of literary greatness.” Devoted fans will find many new insights here, while readers looking to discover Plath’s poetry for the first time will find no better introduction to her work.

Sarah Ruden has translated Vergil’s Aeneid, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Augustine’s Confessions, and other works, and has published books about the Bible (Paul among the People and The Face of Water) and a biography of Vergil. Her biography of the martyr Perpetua is forthcoming from Yale University Press and A Short History of Bad Ideas, her survey of writing against reproductive choice since the Roman Empire, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton.