ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights Eliot's phrase 'raid on the inarticulate' that could be appropriated for that identity of 'voice' and 'self which we have seen to be central to the dominant interpretive narrative of Sylvia Plath's criticism, while 'constructs for the inarticulate' suggests a gap between language and self, which permits the largely unacknowledged variety of the late poems. There are the narratives by which Plath appears to have constructed her conscious life in her journals, the counter-narratives of her own letters to her mother and The Bell Jar, the various 'myths' that according to Alvarez himself a major myth-maker as well as her first important critic were already 'gathering around her work' even before Ariel was published. The selection and ordering of Ariel is the theme of a polemical essay by Marjorie Perloff which is a convenient focus for studying the way narratives function in shaping argument about Plath's poetry.
