Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath, (1932-63). US poet. Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a university professor. As an undergraduate at Smith College she ‘showed early signs of literary brilliance but also suffered from severe depression, leading to a suicide at-tempt in 1953. She married the British poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and settled permanently in Britain three years later. Her first book of poems, The Colossus, was published in 1960. At the end of 1962 Hughes abandoned Plath and their two small children to live with another woman. The following months, the last of her life, were marked by an apparent mental breakdown accompanied by a burst of creativity. During this period she published her novel The Bell Jar (1963) and wrote most of the poems for which she is best known. In early 1963 she committed suicide by gassing herself; she was 30 years old. A first selection of the fearsomely intense poems written at the end of her life was published as Ariel (1965), which caused a literary sensation. Further poems appeared in the 1970s and in Plath’s Collected Poems (1981), which won a Pulitzer prize.
