Emerging from another cycle of sickness two days later, Sylvia wrote yet another apology to Aurelia, asking forgiveness for her grumpy, fever-induced letters. She now could count on Susan O’Neill-Roe, “dear to the children” and a love to Sylvia. The next day, Sylvia would dedicate “Cut” to Susan. Sylvia wrote in gushing tones about wanting to “study, learn history, politics, languages, travel. I want to be the most loving and fascinating mother in the world,” she declared to Aurelia. To Clarissa Roche, on 25 October, Sylvia wrote an equally buoyant letter announcing, “things were calming down,” and that she was happily planning her future now that Ted with his scornful comments about her novel writing was no longer in the way.

Sylvia Plath not only aggrandized her life, she also made her body into a historic and mythic battleground, the site of an epic contestation. Perhaps better than any poem she wrote, “Cut” exemplifies her grandiosity of purpose, the thrill of cutting her “thumb instead of an onion.” These lines bespeak a persona intent on watching itself with excited yet clinical detachment. The shocking accident becomes a vignette of a pilgrim scalped by an Indian, and then—like a CinemaScope feature—the landscape broadens outward to encompass the image of a million soldiers, “Redcoats,” an allusion, apparently, to the blood flowing from the thumb Plath almost cut off. This virtual severing of a digit makes her wonder whose side these Redcoats are on, as if some treachery is involved in what she has done to herself. Thus she allegorizes her digit as a homunculus, a saboteur, a kamikaze man (a curious locution reminiscent of “panzer-man” in “Daddy”). Even more outlandish is the gauze bandage reddened with blood, which looks like a Ku Klux Klan hood over the thumb. The poem ends in a salute to the “trepanned veteran, / Dirty girl, / Thumb stump,” the poet’s yoking of the literal to the metaphorical, the personal to the political, and the moment to history. Allusions to mutilation, war, subversion, and persecution echo what she said in more prosy terms about wanting to study history, politics, language, travel. She had to bring it all to bear on the stuff of her life, the material of her writing, and present it on a world stage. It is not difficult to imagine Plath, with electrodes on her head and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, identifying with the “trepanned veteran”—a “head case” with a hole in her skull.

Such poems emboldened Sylvia. She looked forward to cutting a figure on her way to the city. As she wrote her mother the day before writing “Cut,” she planned to use the money Aurelia had sent to buy a Chagford dress (a reference to a clothing shop in Devon, which today still advertises “snazzy” dresses). She was going to put her hems up and get a fashionable short haircut. “Just wait till I hit London,” she announced. Sylvia Plath had to present a certain “look.” She was as acutely conscious of appearance as a public figure, as Marilyn Monroe, and like the actress, she craved public display of her prowess after the failure of her marriage. In a sense she was a mad girl who could not help herself, but she had the confidence to give in to her torment. As a result, she was now giving the performance of her life, going from strength to strength as she built up to a crescendo of poetic outpouring.

Sylvia mentioned to her mother that her “riding mistress” had said she was “very good.” A woman riding a horse named Ariel appears in a poem by the same name, one in a series produced in late October culminating in the hard-won triumph of “Lady Lazarus,” in which the female protagonist exclaims, “I eat men like air.” Sylvia would show these verses in London, she told her mother. She would be announcing to one and all her intention to divorce Ted. She refused to play the “country wife” he had left behind. A woman betrayed was also a woman avenging herself. Or as the speaker in “Ariel” puts it, “I / Am the arrow.” Yet just two lines later, the word “suicidal” is attached to this same speaker, so that as in “Lady Lazarus,” near-death experience is deemed vital to rebirth. The late October poems building toward Plath’s birthday on 27 October enact an ascent, Lady Lazarus rising “out of ash,” the flames of rebirth suggested by her red hair. As grand as the poem sounds, Sylvia prefaced a planned reading of this poem on the BBC with a comment mixing the mythic and the down to earth: “She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”

In Plath’s poetry, in her letters to her mother, in what she was telling others she wrote and spoke to, Sylvia declared her need for an audience. On 29 and 30 October, she met in London with Al Alvarez and read him her recent poems. He seemed then the only editor who could appreciate her bold new work. When Alvarez encountered New Statesman editor Karl Miller on the street, a stunned Alvarez learned that Miller had rejected Plath’s new work, including “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” as “too extreme.” Many years after Sylvia’s death, Olwyn, who had access to her sister-in-law’s so-called lost journal, would imply in a letter to Alvarez that Sylvia began to think of him as more than a supporter of her work. Olwyn didn’t make the connection, but perhaps Sylvia did: As Sylvia’s lover, Alvarez would also represent part of her new life, just as Ted Hughes had done after Richard Sassoon had rejected her.

Sylvia’s powerful new voice emerged in a program produced by Peter Orr of the British Council. She sounded older than her thirty years and gave a commanding performance. The poems she read were designed for the ear, she had insisted to Alvarez, who championed her as a bold new voice that shattered the English sense of propriety. Sylvia Plath dared to be intense and violent, the “dirty girl” of “Cut.” Like Plath, Alvarez had attempted suicide. Like her, he was a risk-taker, a rock climber and vigorous athlete. He was a fellow poet who likened the force of her work to “assault and battery.”

By coming to London, Sylvia was going to best Ted Hughes at his own game. Peter Porter, a poet in the Hughes circle who also knew David and Assia Wevill, concluded that Ted really left Sylvia because he could all too clearly see her rising star:

It has always seemed to me that Hughes, though formidable, was not as strong and imaginative a force as Plath.… Leaving Plath must have been not just an imperative for someone who wished to love other women whenever it suited him, but also a move to defend his own talent from competition with a superior one. Such a notion might seem doubtful given the greater recognition he enjoyed than she did, but it is one which has begun to convince readers of her poetry since the true scale of its achievement has become known. Judging the completed course of the two poets’ productions, it is tempting to see Hughes’s attitude as resembling Alexander Pope’s Turk, who will suffer no rival next to the throne.

In The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Alvarez mentions that in June 1962, even before Assia’s call to Ted at Court Green, the balance of power had shifted to Sylvia. But Alvarez, mistaking the amity the couple showed him, supposed that Ted did not mind this turn of events.

From the moment Sylvia ripped the phone cord out of the wall, she was declaring open hostilities. The wife who had put her husband first, made sure he entered poetry competitions, cooked and cleaned for him, held her career in abeyance and raised his children—all that was over for Ted Hughes, and he knew it. He knew it because he had seen how Sylvia could turn on people, and he knew she was merciless—caricaturing even mentors like Mrs. Prouty and her own mother. The question was, “What wouldn’t Sylvia do to Ted now that she was aroused?” This was, after all, the woman who had drawn blood the first time they kissed. Sylvia could play the victim, but no victim writes the kind of poetry she mustered in her last seven months.