The Collected Poems

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