News at Eleven: "What would happen if one woman told the truth

about her life?" Muriel Rukeyser asked in her 1968 poem "Käthe Kollwitz," about the German painter of the same name. "The world would split open," she answered. For many American women, the world had split open with the U.S. publication of Sylvia Plath's posthumous volume, Ariel, in which the poet, an American living in England, and a recent suicide ripped the veil from the decorous solemnity ordinarily expected of women.

from double X: When Women Blew Up American Poetry

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