In an interview she gave to Peter Orr in October 1962, Sylvia Plath explained, ‘I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.’ Nevertheless she quickly qualified such a romantic bent by adding,

Although it is perhaps unclear in what sense a needle or a knife can inform cries from the heart, Plath's adamant rejection of an exclusively self-absorbed narcissism as the source of poetic expression highlights the importance she placed on control in the process of converting experience into poetry. As Mary Lynn Broe notes, even though the sheer vitality Plath celebrated in her poetry often takes no definitive shape, this linguistic expansiveness should not be read as an example for diffused emotions out of control, but rather as a consciously rendered love of motion and a self-conscious parody of existing prosody: ‘Plath proves (by careful attention to her developing skills with sound, rhythm, and imagery) that control – not the dictates of illness or indecision – governs her wide-ranging emotional exploration’. While a symmetry of verse and balance in poetic structure lead to the deployment of a fixed, changeless, even stillborn, energy in The Colossus, her later poetry, according to Broe, exhibits ‘an ongoing, lively dialectic between inertia and energy in which the speaker continually takes different shapes, none final, all exploratory. Growth, motion, raucous humour, self-display and sleight-of-hand reversals all suggest a negative answer to her earlier question, “Is there no way out of the mind?” ’