God, Nature and Writing

There are notable differences between Sylvia Plath’s earlier poetry and the poems written in the last 18 months of her life, differences not only of subject matter and imagery but also, especially, of form. This has led some critics to see her early poetry (the Juvenilia of the Collected Poems or the poems published in her lifetime in the volume The Colossus) as a prelude to her later work. Suzanne Juhasz, for example, notes how many commentators have analysed these poems in terms of their being influenced by other writers (mainly Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas) and adds her own comment that ‘this is a glittery, brilliant, self-conscious poetry of surface, a cold poetry’.1