Sylvia Plath: further reading

Some books and recordings by and about Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Books

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (novel, 1963; Faber, 2019)
Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Karen Kukil (2014)
Sylvia Plath, Ariel (poems, 1965; Faber, 2001)
Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (Faber, 1981)

Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Vintage, 2022)
Jo Gill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (CUP, 2006)

Links

• Recording of Plath reading her poetry, Open Culture website.
• Recording of Plath reading ‘Fever 103’.
• Poetry Foundation - information on Plath’s life and work, together with some of her poems.
• Recording of a lecture by Heather Clark on her biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, Oxford Centre for Life Writing.

From ‘Elm’ (1965)

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:   
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,   
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

[…]

You can read the full poem ‘Elm’ on the Poetry Foundation website.