Sylvia Plath

Who Was Sylvia Plath?

Sylvia Plath was one of the most gifted poets of the twentieth century and the writer whose work renders the specific interior landscape of severe depression with a precision and a beauty that no subsequent writer has matched. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932, she was extraordinarily talented from childhood — publishing her first poem at eight, winning scholarships to Smith College, winning a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine at twenty — and suffered her first serious breakdown and suicide attempt in 1953, an experience that forms the basis of her novel The Bell Jar (1963).

Her poetry collections — The Colossus (1960) and the posthumous Ariel (1965) — represent one of the most concentrated bodies of lyric poetry in the American tradition. The Ariel poems, written in a sustained burst in the months before her death, are among the most formally accomplished and emotionally intense poems in the language. She died by suicide on February 11, 1963, at thirty years old, leaving two young children.

Plath is significant for TLA because her work raises, with unusual precision and unusual beauty, the question of what sustains a human being in the face of the darkness that depression produces — and because her own life is the record of what happens when the darkness is not adequately addressed by any of the frameworks available to her.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• The Colossus — 1960 — poetry
• The Bell Jar — 1963 — novel, published as Victoria Lucas
• Ariel — 1965 — poetry, posthumous
• Crossing the Water — 1971 — poetry, posthumous
• Winter Trees — 1971 — poetry, posthumous
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath — 1982 — posthumous