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Portrait of Sylvia Plath

Literature · Poets

Sylvia Plath

1932–1963 · American

Confessional poetry

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and novelist whose intense, controlled poems on identity, family, marriage and death made her a central figure of confessional poetry. Married to the English poet Ted Hughes, she wrote most of the poems of Ariel in a burst of creativity in the months before her suicide in London in 1963. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, and her Collected Poems, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, secured her lasting fame.

How to spot them

  • ▸The Bell Jar and its heroine Esther Greenwood; published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas
  • ▸Ariel poems such as "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus" and "Tulips"
  • ▸Wife of Ted Hughes; met him at Cambridge in 1956
  • ▸Posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1982) for The Collected Poems

Key works

The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)

Her first poetry collection, the only one published in her lifetime

The Bell Jar (1963)

Autobiographical novel of Esther Greenwood's breakdown after a magazine internship in New York

Ariel (1965)

Posthumous collection of her late poems, edited and reordered by Ted Hughes

Daddy (1962)

Furious poem addressing her dead father through shocking imagery

Lady Lazarus (1962)

A speaker who survives repeated attempts on her life, returning like Lazarus

Tulips (1961)

A hospital patient finds the vivid red tulips an intrusion on her longed-for peace

Morning Song (1961)

Poem on the birth of her daughter Frieda; opens Ariel

The Collected Poems (1981)

Edited by Ted Hughes; won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982

Key ideas

  • Confessional poetry: private experience of trauma, illness and family turned into art
  • Striking, violent imagery within tightly controlled form
  • Became an iconic figure for later feminist readers

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Boston, Massachusetts; her German-born father Otto was an expert on bees
  • •Studied at Smith College; a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in 1953, the basis of The Bell Jar
  • •Went to Newnham College, Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met Ted Hughes; they married in 1956
  • •Attended Robert Lowell's poetry seminar in Boston alongside Anne Sexton
  • •Died on 11 February 1963 at 23 Fitzroy Road, London, a house where W. B. Yeats had once lived
  • •The Bell Jar was first published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas
  • •Won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, nearly two decades after her death, for The Collected Poems
  • •Buried at Heptonstall in West Yorkshire; Ted Hughes addressed poems to her in Birthday Letters (1998)

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources