Staff Pick
Daring, unique, thoughtful, and inventive. Plath's "I Am Vertical" holds the honor of being one of my all-time favorite poems. Like beekeepers for the honey, you'll find yourself returning to Plath for a harvest of rich verse, again and again. Recommended By Nickolas J., Powells.com
Most people know of Sylvia Plath but so few have truly actually read her work, and while her writing will never fully explain who she was, it can give a glimpse. Plath was so much more than sadness and grief — she was also joy and beauty, which is just as important and very lovely to see and to understand. Recommended By Aster A., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath's complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes.
By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. So this book contains not merely what verse she saved, but — after 1956 — all she wrote. — Ted Hughes, from the Introduction
The aim of the present complete edition, which contains a numbered sequence of the 224 poems written after 1956 together with a further 50 poems chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring Sylvia Plath's poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to set everything in as true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers.
About the Author
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.