Despite her short life, Sylvia Plath (1932-1962) is one of the most notable American poets of the twentieth century. Writing before the second wave of feminist movements, Plath touched on many subjects that were considered taboo in poetry, such as pregnancy, miscarriage, female power, sexuality, and death. Plath was also a forerunner of Cold War fiction: her novel The Bell Jar portrays the oppressive cultural and political effects of McCarthyism. In her poetry, Plath is known for her sharp and expressive language, fierce and unsettling metaphors, and complex vocabulary. She is most famous for her collection Ariel. Plath was a trendsetter for many women writers in the second half of the twentieth century, and remains one even today. Her work ethic and commitment to writing are just as deserving of celebration as her accomplishments, most of which came posthumously: Plath’s The Collected Poems (1981), edited by Ted Hughes, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982. The Bell Jar has been translated into over thirty languages and is a defining piece of postwar American fiction.
Plath was born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, the first child of Otto Plath and Aurelia (née Schober) Plath. Both of Plath’s parents were highly educated and came from immigrant families. Otto Plath was born in the German Empire. After emigrating to the US, he received American citizenship in 1926. Otto Plath was a professor of zoology and German at Boston University; his scientific book Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934) was considered a seminal work in the field of melittology. His research and interest in bees had a great impact on Sylvia Plath’s writing and inspired her curiosity about bees and beekeeping. Aurelia Plath, the daughter of Austrian immigrants, provided an enriched intellectual environment for Sylvia and her brother Warren, who was born two years after her. Plath’s early life was shaped by a harmonious and happy family life in Winthrop, on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, which influenced her admiration of the sea and her association of her childhood with the seascape, which she reflected on in, for example, the essay “Landscape of Childhood” (1963), previously published as “Ocean 1212-W”, and the poem “Daddy” (1962). Plath’s life changed when her father died in 1940 due to complications from untreated diabetes. Her mother became the sole breadwinner in her family, taking on an instructor job at Boston University. The family moved to Wellesley, where Sylvia Plath attended Wellesley High School, then named Gamaliel Bradford Senior High. There, she was taught English by Wilbury Crockett, who had a great influence on her intellectual and literary education in both classics and modern literature. Plath was an ambitious, stellar, and popular student. Her first poem, simply titled “Poem”, appeared in the Boston Herald in 1941. The adolescent Plath published poems and short stories in magazines like The Christian Science Monitor, Seventeen, and Ladies’ Home Journal. Her early publications also eased the financial strains on the family.
After graduating from high school, Plath attended Smith College, in Northampton, MA, on a scholarship between 1950 and 1955. She took classes in various subjects including botany, history, religion, Russian literature, German, and English. She thrived in all aspects of her social and academic life, as well as in her creative writing. Plath was also part of the Smith College Press Board, and wrote articles for the college magazine. In 1950, Plath co-wrote a piece with her childhood friend Perry Norton, titled “Youth’s Plea for World Peace”. It was published in The Christian Science Monitor and expressed fears and anxieties about the Cold War and Atomic warfare, a concern she reflected on in her poetry and prose throughout her life. Plath won the prestigious Mademoiselle Guest Editorship in 1953 and spent part of the summer in New York City along with nineteen other college girls. Her disillusionment with the urban, glamorous life, subsequent burnout, and writer’s block induced her depression. At the age of twenty, she tried to take her own life by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and hiding away in the cellar of her family home. The events of the Mademoiselle internship and following hospitalisation inspired Plath’s only published novel, The Bell Jar (1963). From a temporal and geographical distance, Plath was able to reflect on the suffocating atmosphere of Cold War America, McCarthyism, medical and political institutionalisation, and a culture that punished women who transgressed the traditional gender norms of the 1950s. Through the kind intervention of her mentor, the popular novelist Olive Higgins Prouty, Plath received psychiatric care, including electroshock and insulin therapy, at the elite McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Her therapist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, aided Plath in navigating young adult life, family relations, and sexuality; she kept a lifelong confidant relationship with her.
After returning to Smith in 1954, Plath graduated summa cum laude. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge in England, where she undertook an Honours degree in English between 1955 and 1957. At Cambridge, Plath encountered the differences between American and European education systems, cultures, and experiences in the aftermath of World War II. She met the poet Ted Hughes at a party in February 1956 and married him at a small ceremony on 16 June 1956. Plath was eager to learn and take on new influences from Hughes and the newfound culture. She travelled to France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, wrote poetry and short stories, and sent articles and poems to American magazines inspired by her voyages, her marriage, and intercultural encounters and literature. Plath and Hughes moved into a flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue, Cambridge, until Plath’s graduation, when the couple relocated to the US and Plath returned to her alma mater to teach English.
At Smith College, Plath taught freshman composition and American literature, revisiting several of her favourite American literary texts and using her notes from her student years. The heavy teaching load did not allow her to give enough attention to her creative writing, and she resigned from her role, determined to stake everything on a writing career. The couple moved from Northampton to Boston in 1958, where Plath worked as a part-time secretary at an outpatient adult psychiatric clinic. She reflected on her experience in her story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, which shares its title with her posthumously published prose collection. In Boston, Plath wrote her poetry, focusing on putting together her first volume, and functioned as her husband’s personal secretary. She also took a creative writing class at Boston University with Robert Lowell, whose poetry collection Life Studies, published in 1959, had a great influence on the postwar American literary scene, emerging as a starting point for the confessional school of poetry. The Boston poets included, for example, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, and Richard Wilbur. In Lowell’s poetry class, Plath met Sexton; the poets had a two-way influence on each other’s work and bonded quickly. Plath and Hughes spent the autumn of 1959 in Yaddo, the prestigious art colony located in Saratoga Springs, New York. Here, Plath wrote her breakthrough poetry sequence “Poems for a Birthday”, which was inspired by Theodore Roethke’s style, Hughes’s writing prompts, and reflections on her electroshock therapy, and “The Colossus”, about her larger-than-life dead father figure, which became the title poem of her first poetry collection.
Plath and Hughes moved back to England in December 1959, settling in a small flat at 23 Chalcot Square in Primrose Hill, London. |The following year saw several highs in Plath’s life: their first child, Frieda Hughes, was born, and Plath’s first book of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), was published by Heinemann, and in the US by Knopf in 1962, with some alterations. The often-neglected volume brims with important and powerful poems. The collection includes fifty poems, including each poem from the sequence “A Poem for a Birthday”, of which more than a dozen were written in Yaddo. Overshadowed by the posthumously published collection Ariel, these poems set forth most of Plath’s characteristic concerns and styles. They frequently interrogate women’s roles in society and express a sense of marginality and inner contradiction, as well as an interest in creativity and the position of the self, reflect on historical events, employ mythological references, and show a desire for a poetic voice. The title poem, “The Colossus”, registers grief and anger over the loss of Plath’s father through the metaphor of a colossal, decaying statue, dominating an island on which his daughter is stranded. Evoking Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a dramatic trilogy about the consequences of a mother’s murder of a father, the poem pictures an isolated space inhabited only by the daughter and her ambivalent memories of her father. The poem, though written in five-line stanzas with every word precise, spins out of control in its diction (“tumuli” competes with “mule-bray”) and in its feelings of overwhelming loss. Other poems from the collection include “The Disquieting Muses”, which finds inspiration from Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist painting bearing the same title, and reflects on the tensions within mother-daughter relations; “Point Shirley”, “Watercolour of Grantchester Meadows”, “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour”, and “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”, which examines the intersections of human and nonhuman spaces and landscapes, as well as “The Thin People” and “Full Fathom Five”, which respond to the personal and historical past. The poems of The Colossus also largely follow a formalistic style, displaying linguistic complexity and a distant poetic voice, which Plath developed into a more personal register. “Metaphors”, for example, proposes a Dickinsonian riddle of nine lines, each containing nine syllables. “Snakecharmer” constructs a terza rima out of slant rhymes, its allegory of creativity echoing Dante’s The Divine Comedy in its stanza form, and Genesis and the Hindu Vedas in its metaphoric “let there be snakes!” (CP 79). “Electra on Azalea Path” alternates ten-line and eight-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, with each stanza’s irregular slant rhymes framed by rhyming first and last lines. Heather Clark, Plath’s recent biographer and the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020), writes that in these poems Plath frequently develops a tension that she does not release.
In 1961 Plath suffered a miscarriage and underwent an appendix removal, experiences that inspired poems like “Tulips”, “In Plaster”, “Parliament Hill Fields”, “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.”, and “Barren Woman”, all reflecting on the sterile hospital environment, loss, and infertility. In 1962, Plath also wrote the dramatic verse poem, “Three Women”, inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film Brink of Life. The poem is set in a maternity ward and allows three different women to speak, each of whom has a very different experience of childbirth. The first woman has a normal birth, the second has a miscarriage, and the third decides to give her child up for adoption. These voices construct a discourse in which women’s bodies, consciousness, and experience are at the centre. “Three Women” was produced as a radio drama by the BBC in 1962. Topics like miscarriage and unwanted pregnancy were taboo-breaking and radical in the early 1960s. Plath started writing The Bell Jar in early 1961, and it was published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Desiring a larger home for creative work and raising children, Plath and Hughes moved to the countryside in late 1961. The manor house Court Green in North Tawton, Devon, provided Plath with a new set of domestic tasks, as well as creative fulfilment and inspiration. While she made the most of the new environment, the cold house, the lack of cultural and literary activities, and the English village, with a predominantly agricultural community, increased her isolation. Plath was already pregnant again when they moved to the village, and their second child, Nicholas Hughes, was born in January 1962. She spent the year writing poems that have been termed “transitional”, many of which would be published posthumously in the collection Crossing the Water (1971). The countryside offered Plath new inspirations: in late 1961 and early 1962 she wrote the poems “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Blackberrying”, “Elm”, and “Among the Narcissi”, and short stories like “Mothers”.
In spring 1962, Plath found out about her husband’s infidelity, and in the summer their marriage broke down. Hughes left her after a confrontation that occurred when Plath’s mother, Aurelia Plath, was visiting from the US. Despite financial hardships and isolation, Plath did not wish to move back to the US, which she saw as a defeat. After making her former therapist, Ruth Beuscher, her most trusted confidant in letter exchanges, Plath eventually considered a divorce, which was not finalised by the time of her death. During the autumn of 1962, emotionally devastated and physically ill, Plath wrote the poems that would ultimately bring her great fame. She reached a creative peak in October, when she wrote her famous bee sequence, seeking inspiration from her experiences of beekeeping and reimaging the queen bee as a poetic alter ego. These poems were the high point of her creative fertility and poetic rebirth.
In October 1962 Plath practically wrote a poem a day, composing in the early morning hours when the children were asleep. Plath, finding new confidence in her poetic voice, wrote to her mother in a letter that the poems she was then writing “will make my name” (L2 863). The poems were intended for a volume she planned to title Ariel, which was published in 1965 under the editorial direction of Ted Hughes. They show a preoccupation with Cold War anxieties and personal and political violence, and they are filled with strong emotion, employ colloquial language, and often focus on a personal rebirth. In “Daddy”, written in five-line stanzas with most lines ending in an “oo” of lament, the speaker exorcises the ghost of a tyrannical father who is reimagined as a devilish Nazi figure: “I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look // And a love of the rack and the screw” (CP 224). Seeking inspiration from both Otto Plath and Ted Hughes, the poem goes far beyond a confessional tone and reflects more generally on patriarchal violence and control. The poem ends with one of the most striking and ambiguous denunciations in poetic history: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (CP 224). Four days after writing “Daddy”, Plath wrote “Medusa”, an ambivalent castigation of her mother. Also written in five-line stanzas, though without the keening line-endings, the poem figures the mother as a “medusa”, at once the Gorgon monster of classical myth and a small jellyfish with a capacity to sting and paralyse. When the speaker proclaims at the end of the poem, “There is nothing between us” (CP 226), an ambiguity presents itself that is similar to the one at the end of “Daddy”. Some poems, such as “The Jailer”, “The Applicant”, and “Lesbos”, interrogate domestic confinement. Other poems Plath wrote in October 1962, including “By Candlelight” and “Nick and the Candlestick”, are almost serene poems about children. “Fever 103°”, which was inspired by her fever, blends feverish delirium with inquisitorial punishment and atomic burning.
Plath wrote “Ariel”, the title poem of her posthumous collection, on her thirtieth birthday. “Ariel” is written in tercets, the defining form of the October poems, and reimagines riding horseback as flight, merging the rider and the horse. It also seeks inspiration from Greek mythology and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “Lady Lazarus” identifies the motives of patriarchal authoritarianism and violence committed by politicians, medical and religious authorities, and in domestic life, refusing to isolate evil outside of the shelter of home, insisting that we recognise the processes of totalitarianism wherever it occurs. In the poem, the speaker defies God, Lucifer, and a German “Doktor”, alluding to Nazi experimentations, and is reborn as a phoenix in an agonising and liberating supernatural transformation.
Plath found confidence in her writing. She decided to move back to London, leaving the cold, large and isolated country house for the winter. She relocated with her children to 23 Fitzroy Road, paying one year’s rent in advance. The flat was previously occupied by W. B. Yeats, to whom Plath attributed a special significance. Plath saw friends, among them poetry editor Al Alvarez, and showed him many of her recent works. She sought to support herself through writing, supplemented by financial gifts from her mother. The winter of 1962-63 is remembered as the Big Freeze in England. The unusual cold affected Plath and her children, who were often ill, with even the pipes in her flat freezing. She wrote “Snow Blitz”, one of her last prose writings, about the cold winter in London. Experiencing the return of a depressive episode, Plath felt exhausted and unable to take care of her children alone and sought help from friends and neighbours. She had plans to take in an au pair, whose first day would have been the day Plath died. By early 1963, she was writing eerily detached short poems with one-word titles such as “Kindness”, “Words”, “Balloons”, and “Edge”. On 11 February 1963, Plath died by suicide. Carefully protecting her sleeping children from the fumes by sealing off their room and the kitchen, she placed her head on the oven door and turned on the gas. By the time she was discovered, she had suffocated. Plath left her poetry manuscript titled Ariel on her desk. The manuscript was published, with omissions and replacements, by Ted Hughes in 1965.
Ariel became an instant classic. In her poems, we witness female personas moving from submission and enslavement to subversion and rebellion—and even to autonomy, self-acceptance, and the invention of an appropriate language. We watch as personal and public discourses rub off on each other, creating an ambivalent, contingent kinship between the suffering, private poet and the wretchedness of the world. Plath intended Ariel to start with the poem “Morning Song”, which expresses motherly love, and to end with creative rebirth and hope in the poem “Wintering”. In 2004, Faber issued the original manuscript in Ariel: The Restored Edition, with a foreword by Frieda Hughes and additional facsimiles of poem drafts. With Ariel, Plath became one of the most daring, significant, and defining voices of twentieth-century poetry. In her best poems, Plath was able to merge personal disclosure with social disclosure, revelation with spectacle, and vulnerability with irony. She composed the most vivid and memorable poems of her era, breaking the limits of what lyric poetry could be and do. Plath’s complete works of poetry, The Poems of Sylvia Plath, is to be published in 2026.
Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, which was published by Heinemann on 14 January 1963, was reissued in 1966 under the name Sylvia Plath by Faber. It was only published in the US in 1971, by Harper & Row, and instantly became a bestseller. The Bell Jar remains Plath’s best-known work and her only published novel. In her personal stories and reflections, we witness the themes that interested her throughout her life, including idyllic landscapes, hidden interpersonal dynamics, family economics, failures, domesticity, and surrealistic and dreamlike visions, giving a full landscape in vignettes of the postwar era. Her short stories and non-fiction writings, including her journalistic writings during the Smith College years, book reviews, and essays, are now fully published in The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (2024).
Important selected poetry and fiction publications:
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Faber & Faber, 1965.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. London: Faber
& Faber, 2004.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. London: Faber & Faber,
2001.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New
York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath. Ed.
Peter K. Steinberg. London: Faber & Faber, 2024.
Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus. London: Faber & Faber,
1990.
Plath, Sylvia. Crossing the Water. London: Faber &
Faber, 1975.
Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other
Prose Writings. London: Faber & Faber, 1979.
Plath, Sylvia. Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom. London:
Faber & Faber, 2019.
Plath, Sylvia. Winter Trees. London: Faber & Faber,
1971.
Plath, Sylvia. The Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V.
Kukil and Amanda Golden. London: Faber &Faber, 2026.
Plath, Sylvia, and David Roberts. Collected Children’s
Stories. London: Faber &Faber, 2001.
Important selected non-fiction publications:
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963.
Ed. Aurelia Plath. London: Faber & Faber, 1990.
Plath, Sylvia. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I:
1940–1956. Ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. London:
Faber & Faber, 2017.
Plath, Sylvia. The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume II:
1956-1963. Ed. Karen V. Kukil and Peter K. Steinberg. London:
Faber & Faber, 2018.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Ed. Karen V. Kukil. USA: Anchor Books, 2002.
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Citation: Axelrod, Steven, Dorka Tamas. "Sylvia Plath". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 September 2003; last revised 02 May 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3579, accessed 02 May 2025.]
