Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath 1932-63, American poet, b. Boston. Educated at Smith College and Cambridge, Plath published poems even as a child and won many academic and literary awards. Her first volume of poetry, The Colossus (1960), is at once highly disciplined, well crafted, and intensely personal; these qualities are present in all her work. Ariel (1968), considered her finest book of poetry, was written in the last months of her life and published posthumously, as were Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1972). Her late poems reveal an objective detachment from life and a growing fascination with death. They are rendered with impeccable and ruthless art, describing the most extreme reaches of Plath's consciousness and passions. Her one novel, The Bell Jar (1971), originally published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1962, is autobiographical, a fictionalized account of a nervous breakdown she suffered when in college. Plath was married to the poet Ted Hughes and was the mother of two children. She committed suicide in London in Feb., 1963. Ever since, her brief life, troubled marriage, and fiercely luminous poetry have provided the raw materials for interpretation by a small army of biographers, feminists, memoirists, novelists, playwrights, scholars, and others.

Bibliography: See her collected poems (1981); occasional prose, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979); journals, ed. by T. Hughes and F. McCullough (1983); The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (2000), ed. by K. V. Kulil; biographies by E. Butscher (1979), A. Stevenson (1989), P. Alexander (1991), R. Hayman (1991), J. Rose (1991), and L. Wagner-Martin (rev. ed. 2003); J. Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994); T. Hughes, Birthday Letters (1998); D. Middlebrook, Her Husband: Hughes and Plath-A Marriage (2003); J. Becker, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath: A Memoir (2004); studies by M. Broe (1980), J. Rosenblatt (1982), and L. Wagner-Martin, ed. (1988, repr. 1997).

Plath, Sylvia (1932–63), born in Massachusetts, attended Smith College on a scholarship endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, who later befriended her and appeared in her fiction. She suffered a nervous breakdown (1953) but returned to Smith to graduate (1955). These experiences formed the basis of her moving novel The Bell Jar (1963), published under the pseudonym Victoria Lewis. A scholarship took her to England, where she married the British poet Ted Hughes. They lived briefly in the U.S., while she taught at Smith, but after returning to England and seemingly settling down with family and as an author, she suddenly took her life. Her intense, candid, and personal poems were published in the U.S. as The Colossus (1962), Ariel (1966), Crossing the Water (1971), and Winter Trees (1972). Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977) collects various prose writings. Letters Home (1975) is a selection of correspondence. Her Journals was published in 1982. Her Collected Poems (1981) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.