Sylvia Plath: Biography, Achievements & Lasting Legacy

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously.

Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then the University of Cambridge in England, where she was a Fulbright student at Newnham College. In 1959, Plath took a creative writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Within this seminar, Plath, Lowell and Sexton, whilst starting with very different writing styles, each gravitated towards a new style of poetry dubbed confessional for its use of personal experience and its tendency to use a direct form of address. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 in London. In 1957, they briefly moved to the United States, but moved back to England in the winter of 1959.

Letters written by Plath to her therapist, Dr Ruth Barnhouse, reveal allegations that her husband was physically abusive. These unpublished letters, written between 1960 and 1963, additionally allege emotional abuse. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962.

Plath suffered a lifelong battle with severe depression, often characterized as a bipolar-type illness, leading to multiple traumatic treatments with early model electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She died by suicide at age 30 in London on February 11, 1963.