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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)Short Biography

Born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts,Sylvia Plath published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.

Sylvia's surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father (he was a college professorand an expert on bees) when she was eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned from a stay in New York City where she had been a student ``guest editor'' at Mademoiselle Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded inkilling herself by swallowing sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.

In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes , and in 1960, when she was 28, her first book, The Colossus, was

published in England. The poems in this book---formally precise, well wrought---show clearly the dedication with which Sylvia had served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Ted Hughes settled for awhile in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.

The winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, foundSylvia living in a small London flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; this wasfollowed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and,in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) - BibliographyThe works of Sylvia PlathAmerican Editions

Ariel The collection that established her fame. The Bed Book The Bell Jar The Colossus and Other Poems Her first published collection of poems, includes "The Beekeeper's Daughter", "The Disquieting Muses", "Full Fathom Five" and others. (40 poems)Collected Poems Containing everything that Sylvia Plath wrote

after 1956, this is one of the most comprehensive collectionsof her work. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Ted Hughes. Crossing the Water The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams Short stories, prose anddiary excerpts. The title story is a wonderful and haunting piece of writing. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings ofher imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband,the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflectthemes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.The Journals of Sylvia Plath (abridged) Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By the time she was at Smith College, when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for writing. Plath's ambitions as a writer were urgent and ultimately all-consuming, requiring of her a heat,a fantastic chaos, even a violence that burned straight through her. The intensity of this struggle is rendered in her journals with an unsparing clarity, revealing both the frequent desperation of her situation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath ed. by Diana Secker Larson, A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal andliterary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both herfrequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.

Plath : Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets) Letters home : correspondence, 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober PlathWinter Trees

Audio Tapes and Videos

Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath (Video)Plath is heard in a long interview and reading numerous poemsconveying the emotional power of her world. Critics and her mother discuss the young woman who became the contemporary icon of the divided self. Archival footage chronicles Plath'smeteoric career.Voices and Visions: Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath Reads : Leaving Early, Candles, the Disquieting Muses and Other of Her PoemsVoice of the Poet: Plath The Poet Speaks: 1The Bell JarThe It-Doesn'T-Matter SuitMaster Poets Collection, The: Sylvia Plath - Growth of a Poet

English Editions

Ariel Plath's best-known collection of poems which "established her reputation with its courageous and controlled treatment of extreme and painful states of mind". Collected Poems Collected Children's StoriesCrossing the Water Johnny Panic and the Bible of DreamsSelected Poems Sylvia Plath: Poems selected by Ted Hughes Letters Home Plath's letters to her mother, selected and edited by Aurelia Schober Plath. Sylvia Plath's correspondence, addressed chiefly to her mother, from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s up to her suicide in

London in February 1963. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, these letters also hint at her potential for deep despair. Mrs Cherry's Kitchen The Bed BookThe Bell Jar Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly- written book, which remains one ofthe best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. The Colossus The It-doesn't-matter Suit A children's story by Sylvia Plathwhich was found in manuscript form after her death. Max Nix lives with his mama and papa and six brothers in a small village called Winkelburg. Max longs for a suit - not just a workaday suit, but one for doing everything. One day, a mysterious parcel arrives. The Journals of Sylvia Plath The 23 journals detail her adultlife: student days at Smith College, her time at Cambridge University where she met and later married the poet Ted Hughes, the two years spent living in New England and life inDevon, including the birth of their children, before the marriage broke down in 1962. Three Women Winter Trees

Rare EditionsTed Hughes published a number of Plath's poems in small editions, mainly in London.

A Day in JuneAmong the NarcissiChildCrystal gazer and other poems

DIALOGUE OVER A OUIJA BOARD. A Verse Dialogue.The Green Rock. Lyonnesse: poemsThe Magic MirrorMillion Dollar MonthPigeon Post PursuitStings : Original Drafts of the Dreams of the Poem Facsimile Reproduced from the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith CollegeTwo Poems Uncollected Poems.

Sylvia Plath - Online Essays and Paperscriticism

Diane S. Bonds: The Separative Self in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jarfrom "Women's Studies", Vol. 18, No. 1, May, 1990, pp. 49-64.In this essay, Bonds reconsiders feminist critical analysis of The Bell Jar, drawing attention to Esther Greenwood's recovery in the novel. According to Bonds, Esther fails to establish an autonomous, or separative, self, and ultimately resorts to "culturally-ingrained stereotypes of women."

Jeannine Dobbs: 'Viciousness in the Kitchen': Sylvia Plath's Domestic Poetryfrom "Modern Language Studies", Vol. 7, No. 2, 1977, pp.11-25.In this essay, Dobbs examines allusions to marriage and motherhood in Plath's poetry. According to Dobbs, the hostile and often violent imagery in such pieces reflects Plath's strong resistance to the prospect of domestic entrapment as a wife and mother.

William Freedman: The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror'from "Papers on Language and Literature", Vol. 108, No.

5, October, 1993, pp. 152-69.In this essay, Freedman discusses Plath's use of the mirror as a symbol of female passivity, subjugation, andPlath's own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to reconcile the competing obligations of artistic and domestic life.]

Ted Hughes: On Sylvia Plathfrom "Raritan", Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 1-10. In this essay, Hughes comments on Plath's struggle to transcribe her private anguish into the fiction of The Bell Jar. According to Hughes, Plath's difficulty stemmed from her effort to produce a novel with both mythic aspirations and cathartic ritual based in reality.

Brita Lindberg-Seyersted: Sylvia Plath's Psychic Landscapesfrom "English Studies", Vol. 71, No. 6, December, 1990, pp. 509-22.In this essay, Lindberg-Seyersted examines the development of Plath's poetry through analysis of major themes and imagery found in her description of landscapes, seascapes, and the natural world.

Wendy Martin: 'God's Lioness'--Sylvia Plath, Her Prose and Poetryfrom "Women's Studies", Vol. 1, 1973, pp. 191-8.n this essay, Martin provides both a brief overview of The Bell Jar and examples of Plath's poetry to illustrate the autobiographic and social context of her work. Challenging the "negative and even hostile judgment of Plath's politics" levelled by some critics, Martin extols Plath's talent and influence as "one of the leading American women poets since Emily Dickinson."

Al Strangeways: 'The Boot in the Face': The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plathfrom "Contemporary Literature", Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 370-90.In this essay, Strangeways examines Plath's references to the Holocaust in light of her preoccupation with personal history and myth, female victimization, and the

specter of nuclear war. Strangeways concludes that Plathdoes not simply reduce the atrocity of the Holocaust to metaphor, but draws attention to the ambiguous and potentially dangerous interrelationship between "myth, history, and poetry in the post-Holocaust world."

M. D. Uroff: Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsiderationfrom "Iowa Review", Vol. 8, No. 1, 1977, pp. 104-15.In this essay, Uroff contrasts Plath's poetic voice withthe confessional mode developed by American poet Robert Lowell. Uroff contends that Plath, unlike Lowell, incorporates abstracted autobiographic detail in her poetry only to amplify or dramatize feelings of pain andsorrow rather than to induce actual self-revelation.

Linda Wagner: Plath's 'Ariel': 'Auspicious Gales'from "Concerning Poetry", Vol. 10, No. 2, 1977, pp. 5-7.In this essay, Wagner draws attention to the complexity of Plath's poetry in Ariel which, as the critic notes, invokes archetypal imagery and the paradoxical portrayalof suffering as survival to create depth of feeling and insight.

Linda Wagner: Plath's The Bell Jar as Female 'Bildungsroman'from "Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal", Vol. 12, Nos. 1-6, 1986, pp. 55-68.

student papers and essays Kristen D'Elia: Analyzing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

through a Feminist Lensby an American highschool student, 2003. The paper looksat The Bell Jar from a feminist point of view.

Poetry inspired by Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters Frieda Hughes: Readers (updated) Anne Sexton

o Sylvia's Death

o Wanting to Die Jack Folsom: Poet in Residence Rodrigo Garcia Lopes: Sheep in Fog, uma leitura. (in

Portuguese) Elaine Connell: A Chimera For Sylvia Erica Jong: In Sylvia Plath Country Jim Long: Edgelit Maria Theresa Ib: Scorpion Sandra Lester: Cotton Kid and the Faustian Wolf Carla Hartsfield has published a collection of poetry

which contains 3 poems inspired by Plath and her writing, see www.brickbooks.ca

More poems about Sylvia can be found on Elaine's Sylvia Plath Forum

Ted HughesThe English poet Ted Hughes was Sylvia's husband from 1956 till her death in 1963, they lived together until autumn 1962. Shortly before his death he published a collection of poems remembering his first wife and their life together, Birthday Letters , published by Faber and Faber in England, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in the U.S. It contains 88 poems that cover his life with and without Sylvia, all poems were written after her death, some were already published elsewhere as early as the 1980s but went largely unnoticed.This collection has meanwhile become one of Hughes' most famous and best loved books.

Recently, the Collected Poems of Ted Hughes have been published, containing more or less all his published poetry, including the very rare editions Howls and Whispers and Cappriccios with poems about Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill respectively. The poems in Howls and Whispers are similar to the Birthday Letters poems but somewhat more personal and

private. This book offers an opportunity to get all of Hughes' poetry, including poems that only appeared in magazines and newspapers but were not included in previous collections. Highly recommended!

Ted Hughes died of cancer on 28th October 1998 at age 68.A comprehensive Ted Huges website can be found at http://www.ted-hughes.net (maintained by Claas Kazzer).

The following two poems reflect on Sylvia Plath.

from The City

Your poems are like a dark city centre.Your novel, your stories, your journals, your letters, are suburbsOf this big city.The hotels are lit like office blocks all nightWith scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at nightSometimes I drive through. I just findMyself driving through, going slow, simplyRoaming in my own darkness, ponderingWhat you did. Nearly alwaysI glimpse you - at some crossing,Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old....

by Ted Hughes,printed in The London Sunday Times (international edition), October 26, 1997, Book Section, Page 8-4.

from The Rag Rug

Somebody had made one. You admired it.So you began to make your rag rug.You needed to do it. Played on by lightningsYou needed an earth. Maybe. Or neededTo pull something out of yourself-Some tapeworm of the psyche. I was simplyHappy to watch your scissors being fearless...Whenever you worked at your carpet I felt happy.Then I could read Conrad's novels to you.I could cradle your freed mind in my voice,Chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence,

Word by word: "Heart of Darkness,"...I dreamed of our houseBefore we ever found it. A great snakeLifted its head from a well in the middle of the houseExactly where the well is, beneath its slab,In the middle of the house.A golden serpent, thick as a child's body,Eased from the opened well. And poured outThrough the back door, a length that seemed unending-...

by Ted Hughes,printed in the New Yorkerpublished in Birthday Letters

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) - pseudonym Victoria Lucas  

American writer whose best-known poems are notedfor their personal imagery and intense focus. Plath wrote only two books before her suicide atthe age of 31. Her posthumous ARIEL (1965) astohished the literary world with its power, and has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry published in England and America in the 20th century. Plath was married to the poet Ted Hughes.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.(from 'Lady Lazarus', in Ariel, 1965)

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University, andhad specialized in bees. He has been characterized as authoritarian and died of

diabetes in 1940 when Plath was eight years old.Her mother, Aurelia, worked at two jobs to support Sylvia and her brother Warren, but in her diary Plath reveals her hatred for her mother. At school Plath appeared to be a model student: she won prizes and scholarships. She studied at Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) and at the Smith College from 1950 to 1955. In LETTERS HOME (1975), edited by Plath's mother, she revealed aportrait of a young woman driven by hopes for the highest success alternating with moods of deep depression.

Her first awarded story, "Sunday at the Mintons," was published in 1952 while she was atcollege in magazine Mademoiselle. Plath worked in1953 on the college editorial board at the same magazine and suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. She described this period of her live in THE BELL JAR, her autobiographical novel, which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a month before her death. The novel takes place inNew York at the height of the Cold War, during the hot summer in which the Rosenbergs were sentto the electric chair, convicted of spying for the Soviets. Against this background Plath sets the story of the breakdown and near-death of herheroine. The book is considered a powerful exploration of the restricted role of women. With J.D. Salinger's The Cather in the Rye it is recognized as a classic of adolescent angst.

After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College, Cambridge (England). She met there in 1956 the poet Ted Hughes, "... big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge

enough for me,'' whom she married next year. Hughes's first impression was "American legs / Simply went on up. That flaring hand, / Those long, balletic, monkey- / elegant fingers. / Andthe face -- a tight ball of joy." They first metat a student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, really hard. It set the tone to their tumultuous relationship. Plath decided to be a good wife, but Hughes was not the ideal husband she imagined: he was moody, penchant for nosepicking, and dressed slovenly. Also Plath's suspicions of Hughes's infidelity burdened her.

Plath's early poetry was based on then current styles of refined and ironic verse. Under the influence of her husband and the work of Dylan Thomas and Gerald Manley Hopkins, she developed with great force her talents. In 1957 Plath returned to the U.S., where she worked as a teacher of literature at the Smith College. From1958 to 1959 she worked as a clerk in Boston andstudied poetry at Robert Lowell's course. Plath moved again to England in 1959. Her first child,Frieda Rebecca, was born in 1960 and second, Nicholas Farrar, in 1962. Next year appeared herwell-known poems, the aggressive 'Lady Lazarus' and the notorious 'Daddy', in which Plath expanded the boundaries intimate expression.

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. (from 'Daddy', 1966)

When Ted Hughes abandoned her for an another woman, Assia Gutmann Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill, fantasies of self-destruction took over of Plath's resolution. Wevill was German-born, sophisticated woman,

with film-star looks. Near the end of her life, Plath burned hundreds of pages of a work in progress. In one of her final poems she wrote: ''Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.'' (from 'Lady Lazarus') In a letterto her mother Plath complained that Hughes had left her in poverty, but according to Elaine Feinstein, whose well-balanced on Hughes appeared in 2001, he gave her all their joint savings.

''It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative -- which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great muscularowl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching & constricting my heart.''

Plath died in London on February 11, 1963; she committed suicide. Her gravestone is in Yorkshire. Hughes's name was chipped off her tombstone, and his poetry readings were disrupted by shouts of "murderer." Tragically, Assia Wevill killed herself in the same way as Plath - by gas. She also killed their daughter, Shura. During her career as writer Plath was loosely linked to the confessional poets, a termused to describe among others Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton (1928-74, committed suicide), and John Berryman. Her literary reputation rests mainly on her carefully crafted pieces of poetry, particularly the verse that she composedin the months leading up to her death. Plath hasbeen considered a deeply honest writer, whose ceaseless self-scrutiny has given an unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the feminist-martyr in a patriarchal society. In this discourse, Ted Hughes has become the villain, whom Robin Morgan

accused in 1972 in a poem of killing Plath. "I accuse / Ted Hughes," she wrote in 'The Arraignment'. However, Janet Malcolm has defended Hughes in her book The Silent Woman (1994), in which she sees Plath's literary spouse a Prometheus figure who has to "watch hisyoung self being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers and newspaperjournalists."

Plath's 'COLLECTED POEMS' (1981), assembled and edited by Ted Hughes, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Her journals appeared in 1982 heavily edited by Hughes, who explained that he wanted to spare the children further distress. Feministcritics have suspected that Hughes tried to protect himself. But when Karen V. Kukil assembled the unabridged journals, published in 2000, critics doubted the ethics of dutifully revealing a Plath's unrevised work with grammatical errors and misspellings.

Colossus - first published by Methuen Press in England, and then on May 14, 1962 by Alfred A. Knopf in the UnitedStates. The work fused personal pain and women's issues in revealing poems that would help to popularize 'confessional' poetry. At its appearance it went unnoticed. Compared to Ariel, which appeared in 1965, Colossus was more formalized. Its appearance coincided withthe deteriorating of Plath's personal life. Her husband was unfaithful, she planned separation, and she was alonewith two children and without money. - For further reading: The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. by C. Newman (1970): Protean Poet by M.L. Broe (1980); Sylvia Plath by Lindsay W. Wagner-Martin (1987); Sylvia Plath by Susan Bassnett (1897); Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson (1989); The Death and Lifeof Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman (1991); Rough Magic by Paul Alexander (1991); The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose (1991); The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm (1994); Ariel's Gift by Erica Wagner (2000). Note: Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes, who become a painter, published in 1999 a collection of poems, entitled Wooroloo. She has

also designed the cover for Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes's book about himself and Plath. - Suom.: Plathilta on myös julkaistu suomeksi Sanantuojat (kootut runot).

SELECTED WORKS:

A WINTER SHIP - - Published anonymously THE COLOSSUS AND OTHER POEMS, 1960 THE BELL JAR, 1961 - suom. Lasikellon alla ed.: AMERICAN POETRY NOW, 1961 THREE WOMAN, 1962 - radio play, BBC ARIEL, 1965 - suom. Ariel UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1965 CROSSING THE WATER, 1971 CRYSTAL GAZER & OTHER POEMS, 1971 FIESTA MELONS, 1971 WINTER TREES, 1971 LYONESSE: HITHERTO UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1971 PURSUIT, 1973 LETTERS HOME: CORRESPONDENCE 1950-1963,

1975 THE BED BOOK, 1976 - Sänkyjen kirja LETTERS HOME, 1976 JOHNNY PANIC AND THE BIBLE OF DEAMS, 1977 COLLECTED POEMS, 1981 - (ed. by Ted Hughes)

- posthumous Pulitzer Prize THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH, 1982 (ed. by

F. McCullough) SELECTED POEMS, 1985 - (ed. by Ted Hughes) JOURNALS 1950-62, 1982 - (Introduction by

Frances McCullough, foreword by Ted Hughes;the last journal which ended in Jan. 1963, was distroyed by Hughes, one journal is missing from the Neilson Library at Smith'sCollege) - Sylvia Plathin päiväkirjat

THE IT-DOESN'T MATTER SUIT, 1996 - Salaperäinen puku

THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH 1950-1962, 2000 (ed. by Karen V. Kukil - an exact and

complete transcription of the journals keptby Sylvia Plath over the last twelve years of her life)

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mother, Aurelia Schober, was a master’s studentat Boston University when she met Plath’s father, Otto Plath,who was her professor. They were married in January of 1932. Otto taught both German and biology, with a focus on apiology, the study of bees.

In 1940, when Sylvia was eight years old, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes. He had been a strictfather, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined her relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegaic and infamous poem, "Daddy."

Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed. She kept a journal from the age of 11 and published her poemsin regional magazines and newspapers. Her first national publication was in the Christian Science Monitor in 1950, just after graduating from high school.

In 1950, Plath matriculated at Smith College. She was an exceptional student, and despite a deep depression she went through in 1953 and a subsequent suicide attempt, she managedto graduate summa cum laude in 1955.

After graduation, Plath moved to Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright Scholarship. In early 1956, she attended a party and met the English poet, Ted Hughes. Shortly thereafter, Plath and Hughes were married, on June 16, 1956.

Plath returned to Massachusetts in 1957, and began studying with Robert Lowell. Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published in 1960 in England, and two years later in the United States. She returned to England where she gave birth to the couple's two children, Freida and Nicholas Hughes, in 1960 and 1962, respectively.

In 1962, Ted Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. Thatwinter, in a deep depression, Plath wrote most of the poems that would comprise her most famous book, Ariel.

In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing himto call the doctor, then she committed suicide using her gas oven.

Plath’s poetry is often associated with the Confessional movement, and compared to poets such as her teacher, Robert Lowell, and fellow student Anne Sexton. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.

Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a PulitzerPrize after death.

Poetry

The Colossus (1960)Ariel (1965) Crossing the Water (1971) Winter Trees (1972) The Collected Poems (1981)

Prose

The Bell Jar (1963)Letters Home (1975, to and edited by her mother)Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)

The Magic Mirror (1989, Plath's Smith College senior thesis)The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000, edited by Karen V. Kukil)

Books for Young Readers

The Bed Book (1976) The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996) Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001) Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

Ted Hughes

Edward James (Ted) Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, in the West Riding district of Yorkshire, on August 17, 1930. His childhood was quiet and dominately rural. When he was seven years old his family moved to the small town of Mexborough inSouth Yorkshire, and the landscape of the moors of that area informed his poetry throughout his life.

After high school, Hughes entered the Royal Air Force and served for two years as a ground wireless mechanic. He then moved to Cambridge to attend Pembroke College on an academic scholarship. While in college he published a few poems, majored in Anthropolgy and Archaeology, and studied mythologies extensively.

Hughes graduated from Cambridge in 1954. A few years later, in 1956, he co-founded the literary magazine St. Botolph’s Review with a handful of other editors. At the launch party for the magazine, he met Sylvia Plath. A few short months later, on June 16, 1956, they were married.

Plath encouraged Hughes to submit his first manuscript, The Hawk in the Rain, to The Poetry Center's First Publication book contest. The judges, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and StephenSpender, awarded the manuscript first prize, and it was published in England and America in 1957, to much critical praise.

Hughes lived in Massachusetts with Plath and taught at University of Massachusetts Amherst. They returned to Englandin 1959, and their first child, Freida was born the followingyear. Their second child, Nicholas, was born two years later.

In 1962, Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. Less than a year later, Plath committed suicide. Hughes did not write again for years, as he focused all of his energy on editing and promoting Plath’s poems. He was also roundly lambasted by the public, who saw him as responsible for his wife’s suicide. Controversy surrounded his editorial choices regarding Plath’s poems and journals.

In 1965, Wevill gave birth to their only child, Shura. Four years later, like Plath, she also commited suicide, killing Shura as well. The following year, in 1970, Hughes married Carol Orchard, with whom he remained married until his death.

Hughes’s lengthy career included over a dozen books of poetry, translations, non-fiction and children’s books, such as the famous The Iron Man (1968). His books of poems include: Wolfwatching (1990), Flowers and Insects (1986), Selected Poems 1957-1981 (1982), Moortown (1980), Cave Birds (1979), Crow (1971), and Lupercal (1960). His final collection, The Birthday Letters (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), published the year of his death, documented his relationship with Plath.

Hughes's work is marked by a mythical framework, using the lyric and dramatic monologue to illustrate intense subject matter. Animals appear frequently throughout his work as deity, metaphor, persona, and icon. Perhaps the most famous of his subjects is "Crow," an amalgam of god, bird and man, whose existence seems pivotal to the knowledge of good and evil.

Hughes won many of Europe’s highest literary honors, and was appointed Poet Laureate of England in 1984, a post he held until his death. He passed away in October 28, 1998 in Devonshire, England, from cancer.

The Hawk in the Rain (1957)Pike (1959)Lupercal (1960)Crow (1971)Cave Birds (1979)Moortown (1980)Selected Poems 1957-1981 (1982)Flowers and Insects (1986)Wolfwatching (1990)The Birthday Letters (1998)

A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with PeterOrrORR: Sylvia, what started you writing poetry?

PLATH: I don't know what started me, I just wrote it from the time was quite small. I guess I liked nursery rhymes and I guess I thought I could do the same thing. I wrote my first poem, my first published poem, when I was eight-and-a-half years old. It came out in The Boston Traveller and from then on, Isuppose, I've been a bit of a professional.

ORR: What sort of thing did you write about when you began?

PLATH: Nature, I think: birds, bees, spring, fall, all those subjects which are absolute gifts to the person who doesn't have any interior experience to write about. I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

ORR: Now, jumping the years, can you say, are there any themes which particularly attract you as a poet, things that you feel you would like to write about?

PLATH: Perhaps this is an American thing: I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthroughinto very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about hisexperience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much. These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, I feel, have been explored in recent American poetry. I think particularly the poetess Ann Sexton, who writes about her experiences as a mother, as a mother who has had a nervous breakdown, is an extremely emotional and feeling young woman and her poems are wonderfully craftsman4ike poems and yet they have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which Ithink is something perhaps quite new, quite exciting.

ORR: Now you, as a poet, and as a person who straddles the Atlantic, if I can put it that way, being an American yourself...

PLATH: That's a rather awkward position, but I'll accept it!

ORR: ... on which side does your weight fall, if I can pursuethe metaphor?

PLATH: Well, I think that as far as language goes I'm an American, I'm afraid, my accent is American, my way of talk is an American way of talk, I'm an old-fashioned American. That's probably one of the reasons why I'm in England now andwhy I'll always stay in England. I'm about fifty years behindas far as my preferences go and I must say that the poets who

excite me most are the Americans. There are very few contemporary English poets that I admire.

ORR: Does this mean that you think contemporary English poetry is behind the times compared with American?

PLATH: No, I think it is in a bit of a strait-jacket, if I may say so. There was an essay by Alvarez, the British critic: his arguments about the dangers of gentility in England are very pertinent, very true. I must say that I am not very genteel and I feel that gentility has a stranglehold: the neatness, the wonderful tidiness, which is so evident everywhere in England is perhaps more dangerous than it would appear on the surface.

ORR: But don't you think, too, that there is this business ofEnglish poets who are labouring under the whole weight of something which in block capitals is called 'English Literature'?

PLATH: Yes, I couldn't agree more. I know when I was at Cambridge this appeared to me. Young women would come up to me and say 'How do you dare to write, how do you dare to publish a poem, because of the criticism, the terrible criticism, that falls upon one if one does publish?' And the criticism is not of the poem as poem. I remember being appalled when someone criticised me for beginning just like John Donne, but not quite managing to finish like John Donne,and I first felt the full weight of English Literature on me at that point. I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much ason historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.

ORR: You say, Sylvia, that you consider yourself an American,but when we listen to a poem like 'Daddy', which talks about Dachau and Auschwitz and Mein Kampf, I have the impression thatthis is the sort of poem that a real American could not have written, because it doesn't mean so much, these names do not mean so much, on the other side of the Atlantic, do they?

PLATH: Well now, you are talking to me as a general American.In particular, my background is, may I say, German and Austrian. On one side I am a first generation American, on one side I'm second generation American, and so my concern with concentration camps and so on is uniquely intense. And then, again, I'm rather a political person as well, so I suppose that's what part of it comes from.

ORR: And as a poet, do you have a great and keen sense of thehistoric?

PLATH:I am not a historian, but I find myself being more and more fascinated by history and now I find myself reading moreand more about history. I am very interested in Napoleon, at the present: I'm very interested in battles, in wars, in Gallipoli, the First World War and so on, and I think that asI age I am becoming more and more historical. I certainly wasn't at all in my early twenties.

ORR: Do your poems tend now to come out of books rather than out of your own life?

PLATH: No, no : I would not say that at all. I think my poemsimmediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe thatone should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mini I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut-box and mirror

looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things, the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.

ORR: And so, behind the primitive, emotional reaction there must be an intellectual discipline.

PLATH: I feel that very strongly: having been an academic, having been tempted by the invitation to stay on to become a Ph.D., a professor, and all that, one side of me certainly does respect all disciplines, as long as they don't ossify.

ORR: What about writers who have influenced you, who have meant a lot to you?

PLATH: There were very few. I find it hard to trace them really. When I was at College I was stunned and astounded by the moderns, by Dylan Thomas, by Yeats, by Auden even: at onepoint I was absolutely wild for Auden and everything I wrote was desperately Audenesque. Now I again begin to go backwards, I begin to look to Blake, for example. And then, of course, it is presumptuous to say that one is influenced by someone like Shakespeare: one reads Shakespeare, and that is that.

ORR: Sylvia, one notices in reading your poems and listening to your poems that there are two qualities which emerge very quickly and clearly; one is their lucidity (and I think thesetwo qualities have something to do one with the other), theirlucidity and the impact they make on reading. Now, do you consciously design your poems to be both lucid and to be effective when they are read aloud?

PLATH: This is something I didn't do in my earlier poems. Forexample, my first book, The Colossus, I can't read any of the poems aloud now. I didn't write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me. These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I've got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my ownwriting development is quite a new thing with me, and

whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud.

ORR: Do you think this is an essential ingredient of a good poem, that it should be able to be read aloud effectively?

PLATH: Well, I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which wasto speak to a group of people, to come across.

ORR: Or to sing to a group?

PLATH: To sing to a group of people, exactly.

ORR: Setting aside poetry for a moment, are there other things you would like to write, or that you have written?

PLATH: Well, I always was interested in prose. As a teenager,I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry. Poetry,I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals. And I miss them! I'm a woman, I like my little Lares and Penates, I like trivia, and I find that in a novel I can get more of life, perhaps not such intense life, but certainly more of life, and so I've become very interested in novel writing as a result.

ORR: This is almost a Dr. Johnson sort of view, isn't it? What was it he said, 'There are some things that are fit for inclusion in poetry and others which are not'?

PLATH: Well, of course, as a poet I would say pouf! I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can't put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can't!

ORR: Do you find yourself much in the company of other writers, of poets?

PLATH: I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything butwriters. I think writers and artists are the most narcissistic people. I mustn't say this, I like many of them,in fact a great many of my friends happen to be writers and artists. But I must say what I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keepbees. Well, she can't understand anything I write. And I findmyself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And amongmy friends I find people who know all about boats or know allabout certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I'm fascinated by this mastery of the practical. Asa poet, one lives a bit on air. I always like someone who canteach me something practical.

ORR: Is there anything else you would rather have done than writing poetry? Because this is something, obviously, which takes up a great

deal of one's private life, if one's going to succeed at it. Do you ever have any lingering regrets that you didn't do something else?

PLATH: I think if I had done anything else I would like to have been a doctor. This is the sort of polar opposition to being a writer, I suppose. My best friends when I was young were always doctors. I used to dress up in a white gauze helmet and go round and see babies born and cadavers cut open. This fascinated me, but I could never bring myself to disciplining myself to the point where I could learn all the details that one has to learn to be a good doctor. This is the sort of opposition: somebody who deals directly with human experiences, is able to cure, to mend, to help, this

sort of thing. I suppose if I have any nostalgias it's this, but I console myself because I know so many doctors. And I may say, perhaps, I'm happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

ORR: But basically this thing, the writing of poetry, is something which has been a great satisfaction to you in your life, is it?

PLATH: Oh, satisfaction! I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.