Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This comprehensive volume contains all Sylvia Plath's mature poetry written from 1956 up to her death in 1963. The poems are drawn from the only collection Plath published while alive, The Colossus, as well as from posthumous collections Ariel, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees .

The text is preceded by an introduction by Ted Hughes and followed by notes and comments on individual poems. There is also an appendix containing fifty poems from Sylvia Plath's juvenilia.

This collection was awarded the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

'For me, the most important literary event of 1981 has been the publication, eighteen years after her death, of Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems , confirming her as one of the most powerful and lavishly gifted poets of our time.' A. Alvarez in the Observer

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Kirkus Book Review

The large following Sylvia Plath's poetry has acquired since her untimely death will no doubt insure an unusual degree of interest in this collection. Readers who are not already devotees, however, will likely find that interest greatly out of proportion to its object. The previously unpublished work (including a selection of juvenilia) here printed holds no revelations, while most of the well-known later poems, now that their initial shock has worn off, seem sadly diminished by the passing of their particular moment. This volume does fill out our picture of Plath's development, but fails, ultimately, to justify the kind of claims implied by such a comprehensive presentation. What it does make clear is that Plath, despite the undeniable growth in her technical abilities, never devised a method to express the full power of the painful and violent emotions that were her subject. In the more amibitious later poems, Plath's language continually breaks down into exaggerated rhetoric under the weight of too extreme an experience. Those few poems that combine the focus and reserve of her early work with the urgency of her final phase seem now her most durable accomplishments: ""Years later I/ Encounter them on the road--/Words dry and riderless,/ The indefatigable hoof-taps./While/ From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars/Govern a life."" But in reading most of this volume one can hardly help feeling that Plath's ambition far outstripped her achievement. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Sylvia Plath's best poetry was produced, tragically, as she pondered self-destruction---in her poems as well as her life---and she eventually committed suicide. She had an extraordinary impact on British as well as American poetry in the few years before her death, and affected many poets, particularly women, in the generation after. She is a confessional poet, influenced by the approach of Robert Lowell.

Born in Boston, a graduate of Smith College, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge University, on a Fulbright Fellowship and married the British poet Ted Hughes. Of her first collection,The Colossus and Other Poems (1962), the Times Literary Supplement remarked, "Plath writes from phrase to phrase as well as with an eye on the larger architecture of the poem; each line, each sentence is put together with a good deal of care for the springy rhythm, the arresting image and---most of all, perhaps---the unusual word."

Plath's second book of poetry, Ariel, written in 1962 in a last fever of passionate creative activity, was published posthumously in 1965 and explores dimensions of women's anger and sexuality in groundbreaking new ways. Plath's struggles with women's issues, in the days before the second wave of American feminism, became legendary in the 1970s, when a new generation of women readers and writers turned to her life as well as her work to understand the contradictory pressures of ambitious and talented women in the 1950s. The Bell Jar---first published under a pseudonym in 1963 and later issued under Plath's own name in England in 1966---is an autobiographical novel describing an ambitious young woman's efforts to become a "real New York writer" only to sink into mental illness and despair at her inability to operate within the narrow confines of traditional feminine expectations. Plath was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. In recent years, there have been a number of biographies and critical evaluations of Plath's work.

(Bowker Author Biography)