Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932. She
grew up in a comfortably middle-class style and attended Smith College. She
suffered a breakdown at the end of her junior year of college, but recovered
well enough to return and excel during her senior year, receiving various
prizes and graduating summa cum laude. In 1955, having been awarded a
Fulbright scholarship, she began two years at Cambridge University. There
she met and married the British poet Ted
Hughes and settled in England, bearing two children. Her first book of
poems, The Colossus (1960), demonstrated her precocious talent, but
was far more conventional than the work that followed. Having studied with Robert
Lowell in 1959 and been influenced by the "confessional" style
of his collection Life Studies, she embarked on the new work that
made her posthumous reputation as a major poet. A terrifying record of her
encroaching mental illness, the poems that were collected after her suicide
(at age 30) in 1963 in the volumes Ariel, Crossing the Water,
and Winter Trees are graphically macabre, hallucinatory in their
imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous
emotional power. Her Selected Poems were published by Ted Hughes in
1985. Visit
the Links Page for Sylvia Plath web sites
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