Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 3, 1975; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 14, 1980; Volume 17, 1981; Volume 50, 1988; Volume 51, 1989. Alvarez, A., The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 1971, Random House (New York, NY), 1972. Guardian (Manchester, England), August 18, 2001, Christina Patterson, "Ted on Sylvia, for the Record," p. R3. In the first few stanzas, Plath seems exasperated with her father’s monumentality, expressing her fear that she “shall never get [him] put together entirely.” Further, she is dismissive of what she perceives as smugness in his desire to be an oracle, when all he can produce is unpleasant animal noise. Considering the emotions at display here, it is unclear why she would bother to scale the statue. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. The poems are too rich, too sensual and filling. It was like trying to eat a plateful of prime rib, that's been covered in dark chocolate and deep fried. Delicious, but.

Van Dyke, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993.

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Seamus Heaney. "The Indefatigable Hoof-taps: Sylvia Plath." in The Government of the Tongue. NY: Faber, 1988, p. 154. There is little doubt that she was angry that she was required to write like a woman and remain firmly ensconced within feminine issues. In fact, had this been her only demon, perhaps she might have lived, battled against the tide and produced even more marvelous poetry. She could not persevere, I suspect, with the idea that the world expected her to BE just a woman. Broe, Mary Lynn, Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1980.

Haberkamp, Frederike, Sylvia Plath: The Poetics of Beekeeping, International Specialised Book Services, 1997.

Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2001, Carlin Romano, "Martin and Hannah and Sylvia and Ted," p. B21. During the nights, the speaker crouches in the statue’s left ear to avoid the wind, amusing herself by counting red and plum-colored stars. The sun rises in the morning under the eave of the statue’s tongue. All of the speaker’s hours are “married to shadow,” and she no longer bothers to listen to the sound of a small boat scraping against the stones of the landing. Wagner-Martin, Linda, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1988. Prominent journalist, poet and literary critic for The Observer newspaper, Al Alvarez, called the posthumous re-release of the book, after the success of Ariel, a "major literary event" and wrote of Plath's work: I find Plath's poetry at times to be beautiful and arresting, but more often than not in this collection I was either bored or bemused. Plath uses a great deal of metaphor in her poems, but to me it was not always that clear exactly what images she was trying to convey, which affected my ability to enjoy them and 'read into them'. Instead I just found them quite verbose at points.

Linda would often sit or walk with me when I was under the spell and I would talk breathlessly about one point or another, all with what I thought was an emulation of Plath's deep seated passion. One morning walking across campus, me to chemistry and she to a literature class, she stopped me and we stood facing one another. She smiled at the surprised look on my face. She kissed me on the cheek, and turned and walked away. I stood stunned, unable to comprehend. Finally I went on to chemistry class, although unable to concentrate. New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3.I noticed another reviewer on here had commented that they would not have known when any of Plath's poems had ended if it wasn't for the fact there was a large blank space at the end - and honestly I had to agree. I didn't feel like there was a great finality or rhythm to most of the poems contained here. I also found that a lot of the poems, particularly nearer the beginning of the collection, focused a little too much on nature and fairytale whimsy for my personal tastes. This is a very disturbing poem, and one that draws on Queen Gertrude’s “long purples” speech regarding Ophelia’s fate (Act IV, sc. 7). After the rot and watery decay, Plath tries to pull an Eliot, meditating on the skull beneath the skin: The strange psyche at the core of these poems is made powerful by its seemingly limitless ability to endure self-destruction. But before the destruction, we get to watch Plath begin to become a great poet. Most poets slowly edge their way, poem by poem then book by book, to their major work. Plath got there in a couple of bursts — first here in The Colossus, then a few years later in the months before she died when she wrote much of what would become Ariel. As tragic and dark as her end would be, it's nonetheless thrilling to watch this great artist becoming herself. Sylvia Plath 1438148445, 2013, (Journals, 409): In early July, they brought out their ouija board and spoke with their spirit, Pan, whose god is "Kolossus"; Pan told her to write about the Lorelei. 6 As a result, Plath wrote a poem, "Lorelei," which explored her Germanic roots. New York Times Book Review, November 22, 1981, Denis Donoghue, "You Could Say She Had a Calling for Death," p. 1; August 27, 1989, Robert Pinsky, review of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, p. 11; November 5, 2000, Joyce Carol Oates, "Raising Lady Lazarus," p. 10.

Hargrove, Nancy Duvall, The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959, Lund University Press, 1994. Today I remain surprised that this volume was ever published. Its power spits in the face of social domination. Plath will have none of that: The Colossus is the coldest collection of summer poetry you will ever read. I’m certain this paradox was intentional. Moles, maggots, cadavers, suicides, dead snakes, dead things in the surf, dead things on the shore, dead things out in the water, etc. There were times I was bit numbed out by all that dead stuff. For the first third of the collection, I initially felt the influence of Robert Lowell to be obvious in some of the poems (“Point Shirley,” “Hardcastle Crags”). Now I’m not so sure. Yes, Plath studied under Lowell, and I know as a result I’m connecting dots with the seashore linking the two. But Plath takes the seashore poems into her own dark places, again and again, so that by the time you reach the late “Mussel Hunter at Lake Harbor,” you yourself (to your horror) are fingering the nasty things on the beach: Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 2000, Tim Kendall, review of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962,p. 12. In this 1959 poem, which gave its title to Plath’s first published collection of poetry, she tries to grapple with the legacy and memory of her father, who died when she was eight years old. The poem is notoriously full of abstruse and complicated imagery, which leave it open to myriad interpretations, although most of them center somewhat around her father. (For this reason, it is often discussed in conjunction with “Daddy,” a later poem on the same subject.) Critics have seen echoes of incest-awe in the text, but the text hardly makes the nature of the relationship explicit. No matter what feelings one attaches to the speaker, its brilliantly evocative imagery and mood are remarkable. The speaker crouches in the ear of a giant statue that overlooks the world, a powerful, multi-layered, and disturbing image that many can relate to even if their relationship with their fathers are not quite akin to Plath's.Observer, June 1, 1986; February 18, 1996; March 19, 2000, Kate Kellaway, "The Poet Who Died So Well," p. 21. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. It's had, it's had an, it's made me. . . I'm sorry, I have to sit down and start again. Stevenson, Anne, Bitter Fame: The Undiscovered Life of Sylvia Plath, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1989. Like Plath, I became married to shadow without being inspired to proceed. She was something dangerous to me and at the same time so appealing, having touched an element deep inside. I asked myself if this was Plath's inevitable path towards tragedy.