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One of the most revered poets of our time, Sylvia Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Plath's work is frequently singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.. Although she only lived to see the publication of her first poetry collection The Colossus, her poetry was subsequently edited and published in four books, including The Collected Poems, which received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. Plath was the first poet to receive the award posthumously.

"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. 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chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring [her] poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to set everything in as a true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers."

 – from Ted Hughes's introduction to The Collected Poems

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