Though her novel The Bell Jar has brought Sylvia Plath copious literary praise throughout the decades, her poetry might in fact be her crowning achievement. Bold, visceral, moving, evocative, wrenching, perplexing, and gorgeous, her many poems run the gamut from simple and charming to terrifying and violent. They address such major themes as the preeminence of the patriarch, the sorrow of loss, the yearning for creative autonomy, a mother's love for her child, thoughts of suicide, and ruminations on nature, sex, and the body. Each poem is generally understood in terms of its chronology, as part of one of three distinct phases of the author's output.
Plath's first phase of poetry has been...
