Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956; they lived together in the United States and then England, and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath suffered from depression for much of her adult life, and in 1963 she committed suicide. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers. I think writers and artists are the most narcissistic people.
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Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline--you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.
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I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have . . . I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, [that] one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind.
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Oh, satisfaction! I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a poet in rest. I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.
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Fact
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James Dickey made the ungracious remark "Suicide attempts and then writing poetry about your suicide attempts is just pure bullshit!" in relation to Sylvia Plath in a Paris Review interview.
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Pictured on one of ten USA nondenominated commemorative postage stamps celebrating "20th Century Poets", issued as a pane of 20 stamps on 21 April 2012. Other stamps in this issued honored Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, and Theodore Roethke. The price of each stamp on day of issue was 45¢.
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Nicholas, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, was found hanged on Monday, March 16 2009 in his home in Alaska. He was 47.
She had a genius-level IQ of 166, according to a test she took in 1944.
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Two of her better known poems are used at GCSE level in Britain; 'The Arrival of the Bee Box' and 'Medallion'. Both raise her issues about power, dominant in most of her works.
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Two children: Nicholas Hughes, a graduate of Oxford in zoology lives in Canada (as of 1999) and works as a marine biologist, and Frieda Hughes, who married Hungarian-born painter Laszlo Lukacs, paints and, like her mother, writes poetry.
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Her first national publication was a poem in the Christian Science Monitor, "Bitter Strawberries."
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Her first published work was a short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again, " written while she was in high school.
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Her critically acclaimed novel, "The Bell Jar" was so frankly autobiographical, that Plath published it only in England at first, using the pen name, "Victoria Lucas." It was not until 1971 that the book was published in the USA.
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She is one of the major female poets of the 20th century. Her poetic books "Colossus" and "Ariel" and her novel "The Bell Jar" are largely autobiographical works, the latter dealing with her struggle with depression and mental illness.
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