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.

From quite early she began to assemble her poems into a prospective collection, which at various times she presented—always hopeful—to publishers and to the judging committees of contests. The collection evolved through the years in a natural way, shedding old poems and growing new ones, until by the time the contract for The Colossus was signed with Heinemann, in London, on 11 February 1960, this first book had gone through several titles and several changes of substance. ‘I had a vision in the dark art lecture room today of the title of my book of poems,’ she wrote in early 1958. ‘It came to me suddenly with great clarity that The Earthenware Head was the right title, the only title.’ She goes on to say, ‘Somehow this new title spells for me the release from the old crystal-brittle and sugar-faceted voice of Circus in Three Rings and Two Lovers and a Beachcomber’ (the two immediately preceding titles). Two months later she had replaced The Earthenware Head, briefly, with The Everlasting Monday. A fortnight later the title had become Full Fathom Five, ‘after what I consider one of my best and most curiously moving poems, about my father-sea god-muse … “[The Lady and] The Earthenware Head” is out: once, in England, my “best poem”: too fancy, glassy, patchy and rigid—it embarrasses me now—with its ten elaborate epithets for head in five verses.’

During the next year Full Fathom Five was replaced by The Bull of Bendylaw, but then in May 1959 she wrote: ‘Changed title of poetry book in an inspiration to The Devil of the Stairs … this title encompasses my book and “explains” the poems of despair, which is as deceitful as hope is.’ This title lasted until October, when she was at Yaddo, and now on a different kind of inspiration she noted: ‘Wrote two poems that pleased me. One a poem to Nicholas’ (she expected a son, and titled the poem ‘The Manor Garden’) ‘and one the old father-worship subject’ (which she titled ‘The Colossus’). ‘But different. Weirder. I see a picture, a weather, in these poems. Took “Medallion” out of the early book and made up my mind to start a second book, regardless. The main thing is to get rid of the idea that what I write now is for the old book. That soggy book. So I have three poems for the new, temporarily called The Colossus and other poems.’

This decision to start a new book ‘regardless’, and get rid of all that she’d written up to then, coincided with the first real breakthrough in her writing, as it is now possible to see. The actual inner process of this quite sudden development is interestingly recorded, in a metaphorical way, in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, which she was thinking about on 22 October 1959 (cf. note on No. 119). On 4 November she wrote: ‘Miraculously I wrote seven poems in my “Poem for a Birthday” sequence, and the two little ones before it, “The Manor Garden” and “The Colossus”, I find colorful and amusing. But the manuscript of my [old] book seems dead to me. So far off, so far gone. It has almost no chance of finding a publisher: just sent it out to the seventh…. There is nothing for it but to try to publish it in England.’ A few days later she noted: ‘I wrote a good poem this week on our walk Sunday to the burnt-out spa, a second-book poem. How it consoles me, the idea of a second book with these new poems: “The Manor Garden”, “The Colossus”, the seven birthday poems and perhaps “Medallion”, if I don’t stick it in my present book.’ But then she realized: ‘If I were accepted by a publisher … I would feel a need to throw all my new poems in, to bolster the book.’

This last is exactly what happened. With time running out at Yaddo, which had suddenly become so fruitful for her, followed by the upheaval of returning to England in December, she was able to add very little to her ‘second’ book. So it was this combination of the old poems, which she had inwardly rejected, and the few new ones that seemed to her so different, that James Michie told her—in January 1960—Heinemann would like to publish, under the title of The Colossus.

Once that contract had been signed, she started again, though with a noticeable difference. As before, a poem was always ‘a book poem’ or ‘not a book poem’, but now she seemed more relaxed about it, and made no attempt to find an anxious mothering title for the growing brood, over the next two years, until she was overtaken by the inspiration that produced the poems of the last six months of her life.

Some time around Christmas 1962, she gathered most of what are now known as the ‘Ariel’ poems in a black spring binder, and arranged them in a careful sequence. (At the time, she pointed out that it began with the word ‘Love’ and ended with the word ‘Spring’. The exact order of her text is given in the Notes, p. 295.) This collection of hers excluded almost everything she had written between The Colossus and July 1962—or two and a half years’ work. She had her usual trouble with a title. On the title-page of her manuscript The Rival is replaced by A Birthday Present which is replaced by Daddy. It was only a short time before she died that she altered the title again, to Ariel.

The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from the one she had planned. It incorporated most of the dozen or so poems she had gone on to write in 1963, though she herself, recognizing the different inspiration of these new pieces, regarded them as the beginnings of a third book. It omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962, and might have omitted one or two more if she had not already published them herself in magazines—so that by 1965 they were widely known. The collection that appeared was my eventual compromise between publishing a large bulk of her work—including much of the post-Colossus but pre-Ariel verse—and introducing her late work more cautiously, printing perhaps only twenty poems to begin with. (Several advisers had felt that the violent contradictory feelings expressed in those pieces might prove hard for the reading public to take. In one sense, as it turned out, this apprehension showed some insight.)

A further collection, Crossing the Water (1971), contained most of the poems written between the two earlier books; and the same year the final collection, Winter Trees, was published, containing eighteen uncollected poems of the late period together with her verse play for radio, Three Women, which had been written in early 1962.

The aim of the present complete edition, which contains a numbered sequence of the 224 poems written after 1956 together with a further 50 poems chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring Sylvia Plath’s poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to set everything in as true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers.

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The manuscripts on which this collection is based fall roughly into three phases, and each has presented slightly different problems to the editor.

The first phase might be called her juvenilia and the first slight problem here was to decide where it ended. A logical division occurs, conveniently, at the end of 1955, Just after the end of her twenty-third year. The 220 or more poems written before this are of interest mainly to specialists. Sylvia Plath had set these pieces (many of them from her early teens) firmly behind her and would certainly never have republished them herself. Nevertheless, quite a few seem worth preserving for the general reader. At their best, they are as distinctive and as finished as anything she wrote later. They can be intensely artificial, but they are always lit with her unique excitement. And that sense of a deep mathematical inevitability in the sound and texture of her lines was well developed quite early. One can see here, too, how exclusively her writing depended on a supercharged system of inner symbols and images, an enclosed cosmic circus. If that could have been projected visually, the substance and patterning of these poems would have made very curious mandalas. As poems, they are always inspired high jinks, but frequently quite a bit more. And even at their weakest they help chart the full acceleration towards her final take-off.

The greater part of these early poems survive in final typed copies; some others have been recovered from magazines, and still others, not in the typescript and not appearing in any magazine, have turned up in letters and elsewhere....