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 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 Hughes, Ted (Edward James Hughes), 1930–98, English poet, b. Mytholmyroyd, Yorkshire. Hughes's best poetry focuses on the unsentimental within nature. His poems are marked by controlled diction and style, which create a sense of order and meaning in violent or
..... Click the link for more information. 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

(born Oct. 27, 1932, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Feb. 11, 1963, London, Eng.) U.S. poet. The daughter of an entomologist, Plath was driven to excel as a writer from an early age and published her first poem at age eight. At Smith College she made an early suicide attempt and submitted to electroshock treatment. While attending Cambridge University on a Fulbright grant, she married the poet Ted Hughes. After their separation, she committed suicide at age 30. Though she was not widely recognized in her lifetime, her reputation grew rapidly afterward; by the 1970s she was considered a major contemporary poet. Her works, often confessional and preoccupied with alienation, death, and self-destruction, include the volumes The Colossus (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Collected Poems (1981, Pulitzer Prize) and a semiautobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963).

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.