Plath, Sylvia ( ) 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.Ted Hughes 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.Robert Lowell 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 GinsbergLife Studies: American Poetry from T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg