Jane Hedley accounts for Plath’s descriptive and interpretive practice of poems that take art as their subject. Plath’s ekphrastic poems can be seen as interventions in a conversation with canonical predecessors from Keats to Auden, and can be traced not just to her deliberate study of art history, but to the studies she made as a visual artist, before she made the decision in young adulthood to concentrate on writing.

Holly Ranger establishes a relatively neglected but crucial context for Plath’s work, illuminating Plath’s frequent classical allusions and her sophisticated intertextual dialogue with literary history. Among the many poems that Ranger helps us to see anew are the bee poems, shot through as they are with references to Virgil. All the while, Ranger reveals Plath’s ambivalence towards her classical project, her contradictory impulses to reject this canon, yet the impossibility of her ignoring it.

Jonathan Ellis situates Plath’s work in relation to the American poetry scene of the 1950s and early 1960s. He analyses how a mid-century generation of poets like John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell responded to Modernism through the birth of Confessionalism. Ellis draws on Plath’s letters, journals, poems and stories to analyse her own role in and thinking about this aesthetic turn. He considers the impact of Plath’s contemporaries, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton, as well as Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore, May Swenson and Isabella Gardner. Situating Plath’s poetry in relation to the work of these poetic godfathers and godmothers, Ellis looks in particular at questions of gender and nationality.

Andrew Walker writes from the premise that one of Plath’s most notable characteristics is her sense of the dramatic, her experimentation with multiple voices and personas. Walker establishes Plath’s long-held interest in radio drama growing up in America, and the impact of contemporary radio dramas and BBC’s the Third Programme on her work. Plath’s radio play, Three Women, is influenced by Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood as well as Ted Hughes’s A Houseful of Women and The Wound, which appear during key phases in Plath’s poetic development. Walker accounts for a dramatic shift between Plath’s earlier and later work, and demonstrates the importance of an oft-overlooked, yet highly vital, poetic context.

Lucy Tunstall provides readers with a crucial understanding of Plath’s conception of the lyric. Tunstall brings alive Plath’s continuous, deliberate interventions in the lyric mode’s possibilities and limits. She situates Plath’s development of the lyric in the poet’s childhood and College influences and traces it through to the Ariel poems and their seemingly incompatible registers. Tunstall shows us not just the unsurprising engagement with sound and voice, but with the visual, too, in Plath’s unique conceptions of the lyric. Finally, Tunstall confronts the difficult questions raised by Plath’s treatment of race in the context of her obsessive exploration of ideas of purity.

Fiona Sampson looks beyond any simplistic account of legacy in her nuanced tracing of Plath’s continuing influence on British poetry. While Plath left no substantial or explicit articulation of her poetics, her early published work indicates some of her own literary debts. The free verse which eventually muscles its way out of that initial formality is closely related, in both rhythm and register, to exactly contemporary work by Ted Hughes. Almost universally read by contemporary British poets, she contributes a Plathian dimension to contemporary British poetics as a whole. This is less apparent in today’s Confessional free verse, which owes much to life writing and oral forms, than in the continuation, alongside the Hardy/Larkin mainstream, of a more risk-taking, symbolic and higher-register tradition. Its protagonists include Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Selima Hill and Denise Riley.

Iain Twiddy elucidates several strands of the pastoral that operate in Plath’s poetry, ‘including metaphysical or internal pastoral, the intimacy of pastoral with loss, mourning and elegy, and the influence of pastoral figures’. There is also Plath’s engagement ‘with classical pastoral in early poems’.

In my own chapter, I discuss how Plath came into contact with the many common forms – literary and otherwise – in which we find the second person address. These include instructions such as user guides and recipes; questionnaires and interviews; advertising; letters; poems; and prose fiction. All of these second person functions are utilised by Plath at various points in her work. I provide key examples of these uses and establish the context for the kinds of sources she drew upon. Plath’s formulates a ‘you’ that is fluid and mobile, controlling the reader’s distance from and closeness to the narrators of her poems and fiction.

The poet and academic Sarah Corbett reveals Plath’s profound response to Yorkshire’s powerful and often threatening natural and human landscape, as well as to the writings of Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes. In a handful of poems, Plath can be heard sounding out a Hughesian strain of voice against the ghosts and rumoured angels of her own emergent poetic imagination. These West Yorkshire interludes show Plath making use of an ambivalent energy in the landscape to mirror her self/psyche, a technique that can be seen in many of the Ariel poems, and the beginnings of a working out of the struggle between masculine and feminine voices that was to underpin much of her mature work.

Maeve O’Brien examines the geographical isolation Plath experienced when living in in Devon, yet shows how these circumstances impacted her writing, contributing to the burst of creativity that came towards the end of her life and allowing Plath to mine her surroundings in direct ways. O’Brien shows us just how influenced by and receptive to her lived environment Plath was, and how this environment impacted on her work.