What a voice Plath had – stern yet somehow musical, long-vowelled, bear-like: Radio 4’s My Sylvia Plath reviewed

Can you ever truly know a poet? The question arises every time one publishes a collection that looks vaguely confessional. Is it real, we ask, or is it all persona? My Sylvia Plath, an Archive on 4 programme to mark the 60th anniversary of Plath’s death this month, presupposes that poets are to some degree unreachable. The ‘My’ belongs to Emily Berry, a contemporary poet, who knows that her Plath is different from another’s, is different from Plath’s own Plath, and so on. 

Unexpectedly, given the emphasis on many Plaths and the gap between a writer and their verse, the framework of the programme is intensely personal. It comes as a shock when Berry reveals, some way in, that her own mother committed suicide when she was seven. It may be dangerous to read too much of a poet’s life into their work, but Berry’s use of Plath as inspiration for her own poetry naturally acquires deeper resonance once the revelation is made. 

 ‘Ice cream and pickles’ was how Plath described her character at 17. The friends interviewed for the documentary are equally balanced in their assessment of her. Jillian Becker, with whom Plath spent her last weekend, recalls her fruitless battle to distract her from her misery: ‘I don’t know what she was like in the rest of her life, I can’t say this characterised her, but certainly towards the end of her life she was very, very self-obsessed.’ Another friend, the poet Ruth Fainlight, recollects Plath’s request to borrow apple recipes from her less than six months before she took her own life.

Retrospectives on artists and writers on the anniversaries of their deaths can veer into gushing hagiographies. The ordinariness of many of the anecdotes and lack of treacly commentary on Plath’s originality and importance as a writer make this programme compelling listening.