Sylvia Plath's first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that previous edition.
The book is in two parts. It begins with the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and on which her reputation is founded, and follows with those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections the editors date, correct and arrange each poem chronologically, drawing on manuscripts, typescripts and related material. Critical notes help document Plath's extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions through to the blossoming of early ambition and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years and secure her place in literary history.