ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the local and national renditions of ballooning in poems by and Sylvia Plath. It proceeds, in part, on the understanding that balloons mentioned in one poem by Plath or Dickinson might catch the drift of another. Yet, determining the scope of an image's wider cultural context can be more arbitrary: Miller notes it is It is telling that Miller uses Anglo-American Romanticism as his example of a constraining "local" context: Both Plath and Dickinson treat their literary antecedents as unexpected arrivals from the air. Within the context of American poetry, we might read it as a sly rebuttal to Emerson's "transparent eyeball": The globular wonder of the poet is also his or her undoing. The spectacle of female self-immolation links Dickinson's poem to Sylvia Plath's "Balloons", written a century later. Yet, whether or not we read this as Plath's final poem, it carries its own difficult offer of a teleological reading.
