Discovery of a poet

Do you know Libgen? It's my mainstay for free ebooks. And one day, in a fit of boredom, as I was typing in random names of authors trying to find a book, anything, to pass the time, the auto-fill feature came up with "Sylvia Plath". I've heard of Sylvia Plath, who hasn't? But, having never read any of her works, and having an innate distrust of poetry (such a philistine!), decided I would first read her biography and then decide.

Have been reading her biography as well as some of her poems these past few days.

Phew! Feel-good reading, it is not. Yet, her poetry is magnetic. It's like bringing the North poles of two magnets near each other- they repel but they keep circling each other. I can't read more than one poem at a time and I can't bear reading too much of her life- it's too much! Too much of everything- violence, passion, anger, love, tragedy, everything! Perhaps this is how she appeared to the many men in her life- endlessly fascinating and irrevocably difficult.

I recall, in a critical reading class in English that I had attended many years ago, we were asked to read the assigned pieces by taking them piecemeal, removing them from the context of the author's life (which, in hindsight, seems a bit counter-productive, but what the heck), to be able to analyze the depth of truth, and to ponder on the construction of the sentences and so on. With Plath's poetry, that attempt would be laughable- every thought in every of those lines is about her, you can't remove her from the poem (not least because the poems are confessionals; she writes about her life); but overshadowing every line of every poem (that I have read, anyway) is her death. Among the reviews I read was one that said that her poems felt like they had been written posthumously. I couldn't agree more.