Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
American poet, whose work is
known for its savage imagery and
themes of self-destruction
Ted Hughes and
Sylvia Plath in 1956,
the year they were
married.
Life and Works
• Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Plath was educated at
Smith College and at the University of Cambridge, where
she was a Fulbright scholar.
• Her first book of poetry, The Colossus (1960), revealed
her meticulously crafted, intensely personal style.
• Ariel (1965), written during the year before her suicide, is
considered to contain Plath's finest poems.
• As with all her poetry published after she died, this
volume reflects increasing self-absorption and an
obsession with death.
• The Bell Jar (1963), a novel she first published under the
pseudonym Victoria Lucas, is an autobiographical
account of a young woman's mental breakdown in
response to the constrictions on her life in the United
States in the 1950s.
• In 1955, having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship,
she began two years at Cambridge University. There she
met and married the British poet Ted Hughes and settled
in England, bearing two children.
• Her first book of poems, The Colossus (1960),
demonstrated her precocious talent, but was far more
conventional than the work that followed. Having studied
with Robert Lowell in 1959 and been influenced by the
"confessional" style of his collection Life Studies, she
embarked on the new work that made her posthumous
reputation as a major poet.
• A terrifying record of her encroaching mental illness, the
poems that were collected after her suicide (at age 30) in
1963 in the volumes Ariel, Crossing the Water, and
Winter Trees are graphically macabre, hallucinatory in
their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance,
and tremendous emotional power.
• Plath's correspondence to her mother, which was
published as Letters Home in 1975, gives further insight
into the sources of Plath's inspiration and despair.
• Plath's other posthumously published works include the
collections of poetry Crossing the Water (1971) and
Winter Trees (1972); the book of short stories and
miscellaneous prose Johnny Panic and the Bible of
Dreams (1977); and the children's books The Bed Book
(1976) and The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit (1996), which
differ from her other works with their whimsical, cheerful
nature.
• The Collected Poems (1981; Pulitzer Prize, 1982) and
The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) were both edited by
her husband, English poet Ted Hughes.
• Her Selected Poems were published by Ted Hughes in
1985.
Ariel
• Sylvia Plath's status as a major American poet
has been obscured by her reputation as a martyr,
a victimized woman whose tragic life finally
ended in suicide. Nevertheless, there are many
who insist the poems in her posthumously
published volume, Ariel, represent the most
dazzling and productive short period of writing
since Keats. In this verse, it is argued, Plath fully
realizes the Keatsian sense of the sweetness of
death--a longing to be swallowed up by
something greater than oneself, to become part
of the eternal.
• Daddy
• Morning Song
• Lady Lazarus
• splath01
Links
• Life Studies: American Poetry from T. S.
Eliot to Allen Ginsberg