The mythology that's grown up around Plath has been to the detriment of fair consideration of her poetry. She died young and by her own hand, so her poetry is, according to who's assessing it, (a) all unspeakably brilliant, (b) all maudlin, depressive, bleak, and angry, (c) all disposable confessional poetry. None of these assessments is fair or accurate, and one an enormous collection like this does is make that very clear.

No one's work is all brilliant; Plath is one of the rare powerfully gifted individuals whose best work is a relatively high percentage of the whole, and is stunningly good. What's mediocre seems more so by comparison, and most of the rare outright stumbles are in the juvenilia. She's a poetic force to be reckoned with, but she deserves better than blind romanticizing of her work.

She's not uniformly angry or bleak, either. Consider much of her large body of nature poetry, which celebrates the natural world with enormous joy and awe, and often features a great joy in the sounds and rhythms of the language as well. The poems about her children usually demonstrate the same joys. That her best-known works are the blazing, furious ones doesn't make these dozens of other poems simply vanish.

Nor is her confessional work disposable, and for that the rage that does show in much of it is responsible. It pushes her poems into the mythic, larger than life place that's made this part of her body of work by far the best known.

As far as the edition itself, it does Plath's work a real service by showing its depth and variety, and the chronological order makes it fascinating to read through. I would really have liked the poems with notes to have been marked in the text; as it is, you have to constantly flip to the back to see if there's information on a poem. ( )

What else can be said about this poor woman that hasn't been said before ad nauseum? Her poetry continues to speak volumes on its own. Gorgeous, life-shattering work. As is the cliche, I read her first in my melancholy teens, but she has echoed within me ever since. She is the reason I still read and love poetry, the reason I know that poetry can transform you. ( )

What else can be said about this poor woman that hasn't been said before ad nauseum? Her poetry continues to speak volumes on its own. Gorgeous, life-shattering work. As is the cliche, I read her first in my melancholy teens, but she has echoed within me ever since. She is the reason I still read and love poetry, the reason I know that poetry can transform you. ( )

Spell-binding, iron-hard rage vies with razor sharp wit ( )

Wonderful. One of my favorite authors.