Afternoon lecture with Professor Amanda Golden, co-editor of the Poems of Sylvia Plath (2026)

Amanda Golden will discuss The Poems of Sylvia Plath (Faber & Faber, 2026), which she co-edited with Karen V. Kukil of Smith College. Faber & Faber has called The Poems of Sylvia Plath a landmark publication: the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students, and general readers. Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition. The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected, and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history.