Sylvia Plath

Plath, Sylvia,

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 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 (1956–63) to the British poet Ted HughesHughes, Ted
(Edward James Hughes), 1930–98, English poet, b. Mytholmyroyd, Yorkshire, studied Cambridge. Hughes's best poetry focuses on the unsentimental within nature.
..... Click the link for more information. . She committed suicide in London in Feb., 1963. 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 in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979); journals ed. by T. Hughes and F. McCullough (1983), and unabridged journals ed. by K. V. Kulil (2000); letters ed. by P. K. Steinberg and K. V. Kukil (2 vol., 2017–18); memoir by J. Becker (2004); biographies by E. Butscher (1979), A. Stevenson (1989), P. Alexander (1991), R. Hayman (1991), J. Rose (1991), L. Wagner-Martin (1987 and 1999, rev. ed. 2003), and C. Rollyson (2013); 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), and A. Wilson, Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted (2013); studies by M. Broe (1980), J. Rosenblatt (1982), L. Wagner-Martin, ed. (1988, repr. 1997; 1992), and L. Niland, ed. (2013); A. Alvarez also wrote extensively about her in his study of suicide, The Savage God (1971).

Plath, Sylvia

(1932–63) poet; born in Boston, Mass. A graduate of Smith College, she had a Fulbright Scholarship to Oxford, where she met and married the English poet, Ted Hughes. She had written poetry since childhood; her first volume of poems, A Winter Ship (1960), was published anonymously; her next volume was The Colossus and Other Poems (1960); her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), appeared just before her suicide (1963); other volumes of her poetry appeared posthumously. She was generally regarded as belonging to the modern "confessional school" because of the highly personal nature of her intense, often anguished poetry.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Plath, Sylvia,

Bibliography

Plath, Sylvia

Sylvia Plath

Synonyms for Sylvia Plath

noun United States writer and poet (1932-1963)

Synonyms