Revelation is a rootless tongue, a sourceless river. Before the race even begins, the starting blocks have disappeared. The lost runner is mortally wounded by the maddening echo of a gun unfired. Rarely do poets meet the viewer’s eyes in photographs. But she does.

The aqua cubes flicker, rectangles within rectangles. Tonight, the news of the world will conjugate with my accustomed scrutiny of the cosmos. Dan, Tom, and Peter. Our boys of doom in their winter. Our nighthawks of the woeful countenance. They, or one of their dredged-up experts, will have an answer to every question and a solution for naught. There will be no commercial breaks tonight. The show is being sponsored by our collective subconsciousness. This is a party thrown by the crashers.

And I had in mind to write the story of a violent trespasser long before this evening. For years I’ve obsessed about Sylvia Plath, she of the guileless photo studies. She was a formidable poet. She was another in a long line of female literary kamikazes, the breed extending back to the authors of the Sibylline verses or, if you would rather, to the First Intermediate Period of ancient Egypt, when it is said that female scribes, laboring blithesomely under the shadow of proscribed death sentences, were given the task of ghostwriting autobiographical funerary texts— under the pharaohs, dying in style was given exaggerated preferment over living in the same manner. The most prominent of these ancient farewell poems is The Dialogue of a Man with His Ba. This work, dating from a little more than two thousand years before Christ, is a meditation on the art of suicide.

Sylvia, through the channel of her posthumously published dialogue with her own soul, has been for many years a spokesperson for the alienated, the lovelorn, the vengeful, the suicidal, and for all suicides, speaking to, for, in, and of multitudes from her early and chosen grave. Sylvia’s appeal is, in no small way, linked with her inscrutability and her swaggering mortal failure. This lingering impression seems to be precisely what she had in mind. The meandering and the vulnerability of The Journals, Letters Home, The Colossus, and The Bell Jar are as understandable as Hamlet’s when you read the unmasking act of Ariel. In photographs, she has a first date’s eyes, all too wide and eager, and a blind date’s smile that pleads with you to like her, while at the same time referring in its ebullience to the photo’s substructure; the phosphorescent neutralization of the negative beneath, wherein her smile will surely resonate and her certitude will surely glow, if you will just squint your eyes and hold your gaze. You must not pay attention to her; you must pay immersion. She is a fire that has burned low of its own severity. She lies in her grave now, still awake.

From the perspective of forty years, her photographs have the exact value as her Ariel poems and the same eminence as recollected moonlight. In photographs, she is a captured death upon arrival. She is a bright, evasive, and eternal open question. She is wild and cannot be tamed. She is a wound that can be nursed and never healed. In Ariel, no matter how many times you read the poems, Sylvia is always your first, always your blind, auguring date.

A few years ago, Sylvia’s widower, poet laureate of England Ted Hughes, surprised us all by acknowledging his wife in a published collection.