Open Culture’s Josh Jones suggests listening to Sylvia Plath perform her poems out loud as a way to encounter them anew, “without the morbid celebrity baggage Plath’s name carries.”
They do seem, in some ways, like completely different poems when you hear them in her voice, the wildness and rawness all alchemized into gravitas. Or, as Jones puts it, “her New England Brahmin vowels inflecting every line, drawing out internal rhymes and assonance, then clipping at caesuras like a well-bred horse’s trotting hooves.”
