The Collected Poems Book

Astute, ironic, and intense, Plath's poems brood over a wide range of topics, through language that's cutting in its precision. The poet's sharp intellect consistently is interesting, but her early collections read as less forceful and breathtaking than her later ones; with age, Plath moved away from the stiff but accomplished formalism of her early poetry toward a risk-taking aesthetic of the theatrical. Had she had the chance to develop that style, she likely would have fulfilled her early promise and published several daring volumes.