Selected Poems

Sylvia Plath’s poems are among the most powerful and most technically accomplished in twentieth-century poetry in English — and also among the most autobiographical, to a degree that has complicated their critical reception since their publication. But the Plath of these selected poems is not simply a confessional document: she is a writer of formal intelligence, wit, and extraordinary verbal energy, whose best poems — ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Ariel’, ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, ‘Morning Song’ — are as much performances as revelations, as much art as autobiography.

This Faber selection, edited by Ted Hughes and revised several times since, presents the poems that Plath herself was preparing for publication at the time of her death — the poems of the final creative burst that produced Ariel — alongside essential earlier work.

The essential Plath collection — poems of extraordinary intensity and technical command that demand repeated reading. Published by Faber & Faber.