Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 to February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author whose short life became closely tied to the rise of confessional poetry. Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, she grew up in Winthrop and Wellesley, in a family marked by learning, discipline, and loss. Her father, Otto Plath, was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University; her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, was the American-born daughter of Austrian immigrants. Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the Boston Herald’s children’s section, began keeping a journal at eleven, and also showed early promise as an artist.

Plath’s childhood was shaped by the strict authority of her father and by his death in 1940, shortly after her eighth birthday, from complications related to untreated diabetes. Her poetry and journals later presented the power dynamic in her family as a source of emotional trauma, with her father cast as an oppressive figure and her mother as passive yet managing. A later visit to her father’s grave helped prompt the poem “Electra on Azalea Path.” In one of her final works, the essay “Ocean 1212-W,” Plath wrote that her first nine years had “sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle.”

After graduating from Bradford Senior High School in 1950, Plath attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she excelled academically and edited The Smith Review. After her third year, she spent a month in New York City as one of twenty guest editors at Mademoiselle magazine. The experience disappointed her, and many events from that summer later informed her novel The Bell Jar. During her college years she also struggled with severe depression, received electroconvulsive therapy, and made her first medically documented suicide attempt in 1953. She then spent six months in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital.

Plath went on to study at the University of Cambridge in England as a Fulbright student at Newnham College. In 1956, she married fellow poet Ted Hughes in London. They briefly moved to the United States in 1957, then returned to England in the winter of 1959. That same year, Plath took a creative writing seminar at Boston University taught by Robert Lowell, alongside Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Within that seminar, Plath, Lowell, and Sexton moved from different writing styles toward a direct poetry grounded in personal experience, later called confessional.

Plath is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), The Bell Jar (1963), and Ariel (1965). The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel, was published one month before her suicide. She and Hughes had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962. Letters Plath wrote between 1960 and 1963 to her therapist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, include allegations that Hughes was physically and emotionally abusive. Plath died by suicide in London at age 30. The Collected Poems, published in 1981 with previously unpublished work, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, making Plath the fourth person to receive that honor posthumously.