By Heather Clark What becomes a legend most? As suggested by the old black-and-white Blackglama fur ads, featuring Lena Horne, Diana Vreeland and Cher, among others, legends are people who have soared beyond fame or celebrity into a more rarefied, inaccessible stratosphere. Todayâs media-fixated, Kardashian-dominated world is filled with all sorts of legends, from the elevated to the base, but I can think of few poets who fit into this category. The exception is Sylvia Plath, who, with her perfect blond pageboy, wide smile and cinched-waist dresses, looked less like a proper poet and more like Doris Day. By now, many of us are familiar with the rough outlines of her saga: the shining promise; the death of her adored father when she was 8; the titanic ambition and extraordinary persistence (in 1950, the summer before Plath started college and after more than 50 rejections, Seventeen magazine accepted her short story âAnd Summer Will Not Come Againâ); the attempted suicide during her time at Smith; the Fulbright to Cambridge, where she met the broodingly handsome Yorkshire-bred poet Ted Hughes (âmy black marauder,â as she called him), whom she soon married; the birth of their two children, Frieda and Nicholas; the coupleâs single-minded devotion to their art and conviction about their respective talent, followed by Hughesâs affair with Assia Wevill and Plathâs taking her life in February 1963 at the age of 30 during what was famously Londonâs coldest winter of the century. In the intervening decades she has become a protean figure, an emblem of different things to different people, depending upon their viewpoint â a visionary, a victim, a martyr, a feminist icon, a schizophrenic, a virago, a prisoner of gender â or, perhaps, a genius, as both Plath and Hughes maintained during her lifetime.