Faber is to publish what it describes the “definitive edition “ of Sylvia Plath’s poems in May. Edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V Kukil, it is said to be for scholars, students and general readers alike.

Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition.

The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last 10 years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes poems written in childhood and through her student years.

In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on manuscripts, typescripts and related archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, to the shaping of the poems of her last few years, that secured her place in literary history.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet best known for the poetry collection Ariel, published after her death, and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962. She killed herself at the age of 30 in London in February 1963.Her Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works, and earned her a posthumous Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1982.

Writing in the Guardian, Plath’s recent biographer, Helen Bain, argued that when Ted Hughes “edited and altered Plath’s manuscript of Ariel into the collection published under that title in 1965, he … blurred her legacy into something more complicated, more biographical. The uplifting, triumphant conclusion she had intended seeped away into a sombre fatalism.”

Bain added that the forthcoming Faber edition of her poems “properly reflects the remarkable acceleration Plath’s work underwent from 1959; as well as the distinct split between the Ariel poems and those of the early weeks of 1963 … which indicate the pioneering direction in which she was headed.”