The Book Club: The Poems of Sylvia Plath

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🗓️ 7 May 2026

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

My guests on this week’s Book Club podcast are Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil, editors of the new The Poems of Sylvia Plath, a variorum collection of every poem Plath wrote. They tell me what light her juvenilia sheds on her later work, how art and music fed into her poetry, and how deep her poetic partnership with Ted Hughes ran.

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0:00.0	What happens when journalists, politicians and storytellers come together to make sense of the world right now?
0:07.5	Find out at Fleet Street Quarter's Festival of Words this May.
0:11.1	Sponsored by Lansack and NYU, the Vibrant Programme celebrates London's historic news district
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0:20.2	inspired by the opening lines of a tale of two cities.
0:23.1	Hear from voices including Anthony Scaramucci,
0:25.8	Baroness Hale of Richmond,
0:27.2	Hanif Karachi and Sir Ben Okri,
0:29.2	as they unpack the ideas shaping our time.
0:32.3	Join us for the Fleet Street Quarter's Festival of Words
0:35.0	running 7th, 16th of May.
0:37.0	Visit fleetstreetreetchor.co.combe, to book.
0:43.8	Hello and welcome for the Spectators' Book Club podcast.
0:51.2	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-ed for The Spectator.
0:53.7	And this week we're going to be
0:54.9	talking about Sylvia Plath. I am very pleased to be joined by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil,
1:01.3	who are the editors of a magnificent new Faber volume, The Poems of Sylvia Plath, which is
1:07.6	as complete a record of her poetic output as anybody has yet been able to
1:12.4	buy to date. Welcome both. This is obviously the fruit of many years of scholarly labor.
1:18.8	What's the Sylvia Plath that emerges from it? What does it add to what we've seen before?
1:24.5	Well, I think what it gives us is Plas' early life because most of her early poems were
1:31.5	never published. And she actually had a very happy childhood before her father died, and she was
	...

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