The last few years have seen a bumper crop for admirers of Sylvia Plath. Besides the heroic accomplishment of Heather Clark’s biography, Red Comet (2020), we have been treated to monumental editions of her letters (2017–18) and her Collected Prose (2024), and now here comes the crowning glory of the Poems themselves, nine hundred-odd pages painstakingly edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V Kukil. Their labours are exemplary: a substantial commentary of notes establishes dates of composition, provides intricate details of textual variants and lists the numerous magazines to which the ambitious Plath tirelessly, and often unsuccessfully, dispatched them – all this besides explanatory notes and many pertinent quotations from Plath’s voluminous journals and correspondence.  

It certainly supersedes the Collected Poems of 1981, edited by Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes, not least in giving us a lot more poetry. Hughes printed 274 poems, while this edition gives us 542. A good proportion of these new works are from Plath’s earlier years, and in fact we knew about many of them before because Hughes printed a long list of titles in an appendix. But, considering them of interest ‘mainly to specialists’, he chose to print the texts of only fifty, so anyone wanting to look up a poem called ‘august night’, for instance, had to make a trip to the Lilly Library of Indiana University to do so. That little poem turns out to be an entirely characteristic piece of work, a striking and desolate study in atmospheric simile-making: ‘a bulbous moon / which sprouts / in the soiled indigo sky // and spills winking white / petals of light // upon quivering black plains / of ocean water.’ She is often painterly like that: ‘translucent amber / honey clear / melting into quartzgreen / and glassed yellow ocher’, she writes in an ‘ode on a bitten plum’, and later there are numerous beautifully absorbed poems about particular paintings. ‘A point of exclamation marks that sky / In ringing orange like a stellar carrot’, which is about an abstract work by Paul Klee, is pretty good.

The manners of such pieces are exquisite, but from an early stage Plath was also adept at dramatising a sort of existential or perceptual overload, the experience of personalities for whom, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘the world is too much with us’. The masterpieces of this idiom are among some of her most celebrated works: the exuberant overflow of ‘Cut’, in which, thanks to her sheer invention, an accident in the kitchen spirals out to incorporate everything from redcoats to kamikaze pilots; or the comic-cum-nightmarish persecution of a hospital patient by the vase of flowers by her bedside in ‘Tulips’ (‘The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals’). It is striking to discover already in the poems of her youth this endlessly resourceful art of seeing the object as in itself it really isn’t. ‘Tulips at Dawn’, written when she was sixteen, although much more intently lovely, grows from the same act of vivid imaginative disorientation.

But then, as Clark observes in her study, the creation of the voice of Ariel was to a large extent the rediscovery of the ‘starker, less rarefied voice’ of much of Plath’s early verse, a salutary check to the dense verbalism that she worked so assiduously to acquire during her college years. It is certainly true that her middle-­period voice could come across as over-handled, showing, I suppose, what a difficult influence Dylan Thomas usually proves to be: ‘Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig / He kings it, navel-knit to no groan’, and so on. According to Clark, Hughes played a key role in helping Plath recapture some of the vitality of her earlier verse, and you can certainly see a kinship of sorts between the Hughesian vigour and certain qualities that her writing had possessed long before they met – as in this, also written in her sixteenth year:

I wanted to claw at your face until the blood ran down in wet red drops.
I wanted to tear your hair out in rough handfuls.
I wanted to beat your head against the ground until your skull was smashed to fragments. 

The poem disarmingly describes its own ‘mad vicious laughter’, but ‘horror poet’, Philip Larkin’s term, does not seem quite right. Her excellent English teacher, Mr Crockett, continued to resist enquirers who wanted to hear how unstable and troubled she must always have been: ‘She was a happy, brilliant girl,’ he rather touchingly insisted. After participating in a poetry reading while an undergraduate, she was so pleased to have got the laughs in all the right places that she told her mother she was thinking about becoming a ‘humorous public speaker’. That didn’t happen, but she certainly saw her work as festive: ‘a celebration, in single poems, of birds, beasts and fish … people … and places’, as she put it on one occasion. She wrote a poem about a sow (‘This vast / Brobdingnag bulk // Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost’) quite as jubilant as the celebration of her child (‘O high-riser, my little loaf’).

Sorting out as best they can the dates of the poems sounds like an arduous task for the editors, but necessary nonetheless: sometimes seeing the verses in their proper order is telling. Hughes seems to have been defeated by the dates of quite a few poems. The creepy ‘Pursuit’, for instance, which ends with the couplet ‘The panther’s tread is on the stairs, / Coming up and up the stairs’, appears quite early in his edition, but it is given a date here, 27–28 February 1956 – which is to say, a couple of days after the couple’s now legendary first meeting. Clark is no doubt correct that Hughes’s influence on her writing was in large part beneficial, but the stricken hero-worship of the memorably titled ‘Ode for Ted’, which followed shortly after ‘Pursuit’, is pretty grim (‘For his least look, scant acres yield’). Generally, I think the occasional Nietzschean swagger that Plath adopts doesn’t really come off, unless she makes something funny of it, as in her attack on ‘The Thin People’, which effectively sends up the whole pretension of the superman: ‘so thin, // So weedy a race’. Much more characteristically, only a few weeks after ode-ing Ted, she wrote a delightful portrait of female resilience in a poem called ‘Aerialist’ – that is to say a tight-rope acrobat – a poem all about the grace and dexterity with which one can manage to hold on, but also about the riskiness of it all. The title poem of Ariel would later, in a more hushed mode, also portray a single woman released into the imperilled freedom of the air.

Only one aspect of this magnificent edition made me pause. The editors have decided to follow Hughes in two respects: first, they have divided Plath’s writing up into sections each devoted to a calendar year; second, they have relegated the juvenilia to the back of the book. It does not seem to me very informative to have the passing of years marked like this, and I cannot think of many other editions that do it: does a writer’s imagination observe the calendar in any sort of interesting way? The placing of the juvenilia also seems to me a pity. Hughes thought Plath started as a proper adult poet in 1956; Golden and Kukil put it at 1953. But both suggestions, implying value judgements of one kind or another, seem disputable, and I am not sure why we could not just have had the whole career in sequence. ‘After all you can say, I still think the chronological order the best for arranging a poet’s works,’ said Coleridge. ‘All your divisions are in particular instances inadequate, and they destroy the interest which arises from watching the progress, maturity, and even the decay of genius.’ Not that there was any decay in Plath’s case.