One of the best collections of poetry in any language. Period.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156764 in Books
• Published on: 1980-06-09
• Released on: 1980-05-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780060907891
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
To this day, Sylvia Plath's writings continue to inspire and provoke. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, remains a classic of American literature, and The Colossus (1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), and The Collected Poems (1981) have placed her among this century's essential American poets.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, the first child of Aurelia and Otto Plath. When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died--an event that would haunt her remaining years--and the family moved to the college town of Wellesley. By high school, Plath's talents were firmly established; in fact, her first published poem had appeared when she was eight. In 1950, she entered Smith College, where she excelled academically and continued to write; and in 1951 she won Mademoiselle magazine's fiction contest. Her experiences during the summer of 1953--as a guest editor at Mademoiselle in New York City and in deepening depression back home--provided the basis for The Bell Jar. Near that summer's end, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself. After therapy and electroshock, however, she resumed her academic and literary endeavors. Plath graduated from Smith in 1955 and, as a Fulbright Scholar, entered Newnham College, in Cambridge, England, where she met the British poet, Ted Hughes. They were married a year later. After a two-year tenure on the Smith College faculty and a brief stint in Boston, Plath and Hughes returned to England, where their two children were born.

Plath had been successful in placing poems in several prestigious magazines, but suffered repeated rejection in her attempts to place a first book. The Colossus appeared in England, however, in the fall of 1960, and the publisher, William Heinemann, also bought her first novel. By June 1962, she had begun the poems that eventually appeared in Ariel. Later that year, separated from Hughes, Plath immersed herself in caring for her children, completing The Bell Jar, and writing poems at a breathtaking pace.

A few days before Christmas 1962, she moved with the children to a London flat. By the time The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in early 1963, she was in desperate circumstances. Her marriage was over, she and her children were ill, and the winter was the coldest in a century. Early on the morning of February 11, Plath turned on the cooking gas and killed herself.

Plath was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems.

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Customer Reviews

Truly transitional poems
This is probably my favorite collection of Plath poetry, although some of my favorite poems aren't in here (Morning Song is my very favorite). From the time I looked at the cover (dark waves at night, what could be better for the writer who crossed the Atlantic to die by her own hand?) to the last poem in the book, I felt that I was seeing Plath's vision at its most clearly expressed. You can feel the dark weight of her impending collapse, but her head is still above water, so to speak. I also think that it's the book with the least amount of self-pity; she's strongest as a poet and as a person in this collection. This is not to discount Ariel, which contain some of her best poems, but they're like flashes of lightning in a grey sky of self-pity. In Crossing the Water, on the other hand, we get to see the loneliness of the long distance swimmer, sure and strong, who knows she's heading into danger.

How harsh and wild the metaphor Excess of feeling in poetry is no vice
This volume was put together by Ted Hughes after the death of Sylvia Plath. It contains poems written in the period between the publication of 'Colossus' and her later most famous collection'Ariel.' I know Plath's writing in a quite superficial way and would in any sense have difficulty affirming or disaffirming the iconic status she has attained in the world of poetry.
I in truth did not find the poems on the whole on what I would call the 'legendary level' that of Dickinson, Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, those whose music make their lines incredibly memorable.
But I did find in these poems many startling and surprising lines, a world of metaphor extremely rich and often disconcerting. These are the poems, of a true original whose voice is pitched extremely high. They are poems in which the language too seems searching to reach an extreme level of feeling.
Perhaps the most well- known poem of the collection is the award winning 'Insomniac' which closes with a stanza typical of Plath.

"Nightlong , in the granite yard ,invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica- silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed."

A happier and somewhat milder mood is expressed in the poem 'Love Letter' which I take to be about her relationship with Ted Hughes.
It opens with the following stanza.

"Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though , like a stone , unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just toeme an inch,no-
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

The poetry has a clear and coherent , readily readable structure of simple sentences. But those sentences are so complicated and charged with metaphor and feeling that they are difficult to decipher and comprehend. Their music is however far from being simply lyrical, but rather is harsh, discordant wild and searching.

A true poet yes, but not one to give us calm or peace, or certitude or help from pain.