The Colossus: and Other Poems

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Nov 23, 2011 - Poetry - 96 pages
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.
 

Contents

The Manor Garden
Two Views of a Cadaver Room
Night Shift
Sow
The Eyemote
Hardcastle Crags
Faun
Departure
Full Fathom Five
Blue Moles
Strumpet Song
Man in Black
Snakecharmer
The Hermit at Outermost House
The Disquieting Muses
Medallion

The Colossus
Lorelei
Point Shirley
The Bull of Bendylaw
All the Dead Dears
Aftermath
The Thin People
Suicide Off Egg Rock
Mushrooms
I Want I Want
Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows
The Ghosts Leavetaking
A Winter Ship
The Companionable Ills
Moonrise
Spinster
Frog Autumn
Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor
The Beekeepers Daughter
The Times Are Tidy
The Burntout Spa
Sculptor
Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
The Stones
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About the author (2011)

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories
as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes.
She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes
in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an
instructor at Smith College, and had two children. Later, they moved back to England,
where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote The Bell Jar, which was first published
under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath
committed suicide. The Bell Jar was first published under her own name in the United
States by Harper & Row in 1971, despite the protests of Plath's family. Plath's
Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize.

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