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. The tension each contributor describes between wishing to put the Plath they knew on record, and avoiding giving the impression that there is a definitive Plath to be recorded, reverberates throughout thanks to Berry’s thoughtful narration.

Amid this tension, the opportunity to hear Sylvia Plath in her own words is always welcome, not least because the voice itself summons yet another image of Plath. What a voice she had: stern yet somehow musical, even, long-vowelled, bear-like, if one had to compare it to anything. The tape of Plath reading from ‘The Applicant’, the poem with the living doll – ‘It can sew, it can cook,/ It can talk, talk, talk’ – is especially haunting. Is it wrong to think of it in conjunction with the clip of Plath describing her own domestic life?

In the summer of 1953, Plath served as guest editor of Mademoiselle, the New York literary magazine for women on which Joan Didion also cut her teeth. Didion consequently viewed Plath as something of a rival, though her own preferred form was the essay. Eight of the essays from Didion’s collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean are currently being read on Radio 4. Published in 2021, shortly before Didion died aged 87, the book presents a portrait of 20th-century America quite unlike Plath’s.

In ‘A Trip to Xanadu’, Didion relives the disappointment of visiting Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California, in comparison with observing it from the state highway. ‘On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice’ contains her reflections on her rejection from Stanford in 1952 and the vanity of parental pressures on children today. In ‘Pretty Nancy’, written in 1968, Didion plays with very little – a short meeting during which Mrs Ronald Reagan is told to pretend to cut flowers for the photographers – yet makes it memorable.

Didion, like Plath, has achieved the status of one who is untouchable. She ranks alongside Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Normal Mailer as a pioneer of New Journalism and as part of the mid-century revolution. Her essays, read with just the right degree of wryness by Laurel Lefkow, amply bear out her reputation today. They are spare and closely observed – she was a keen reader of Hemingway – and move in unpredictable directions.

I particularly enjoyed ‘Getting Serenity’, in episode two, in which Didion attends a gamblers’ anonymous meeting in Gardena, California, and is horrified by the members’ habit of attributing blame for their behaviour to ‘miracles’ and other external causes: ‘mea culpa always turns out to be not entirely mea’.