And its the only book I don't lend out the friends and family. It doesn't live on my bookshelves with the rest of my collection. Its the only book I have ever taken a pencil to and its incredibly private. Scraps of paper with my thoughts tucked between the pages. I have this incredibly old, earmarked and tattered edition that is full of notes in the margins, words underlined and phrases highlighted. I mean, its screams 'I'm a damaged girl, and I read Sylvia Plath, just like all the other damaged girls!'īut I don't cringe, because ultimately, her poetry makes me feel. Which is so incredibly cliched, it would normally make me cringe. Since my troubles rarely make sense, that means I come back to this quite often. I keep coming back to Sylvia Plath whenever I'm trying to make sense of my own troubles.

If you want her life story read her diary. The best way to read her, IMHO is to pretend you know nothing of the women and get over the obsession with tacking every poem to her biography. 'Daddy' good as it is, isn't even close to her best work (though it may be the most quintessential). Her work is good, and not about suicide (or sad things) at all. Sounds like I don't like her much, eh? Actually I have no problems with her-just her fans I find irritating. (Hemingway commited suicide too, but if I recall correctly people celebrate his LIFE and not his death.) And don't even get me started on all those who read Plath and practically no other poetry. Every word she wrote is put through the lens of her suicide. See, she has a group of followers who just about worship her to the point of Tori Amos's fans, where everything she's done is meaningful and perfect. I half-wonder if anybody can really be objective about her work. Only Byron may be as difficult in seperating the personality from the work, and with him we at least have a good bit of time since the works were actually written. Whoo-boy, nobody has given me more trouble than Sylvia Plath.

The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath