Sylvia Plath's first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This present volume emerges out of decades of research and almost doubles the content of that previous edition.

The book is in two parts. It begins with the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and on which her reputation is founded, and follows with those poems written in childhood and through her student years, sourced from diaries and letters, published in school magazines, and copied into the manuscript book that Plath kept for her own records. In each instance, the editors have dated and selected the most authoritative text, and provide critical notes that offer insight into Plath's extraordinary evolution as a poet - from her early, precocious determination to be a writer to her place in literary history as the twentieth-century's most fiercely burning star.