Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath had her first poem published at 8, in the Boston Herald. A star student at Smith College, she was one of twenty young women picked in 1953 to spend a month in New York as guest editors at Mademoiselle. That summer, and the breakdown that followed, became the material for her only novel, The Bell Jar.

She went to Cambridge on a Fulbright and in 1956 married the English poet Ted Hughes. In 1959, back in Boston, she sat in Robert Lowell’s writing seminar alongside Anne Sexton. Their work came to be called “confessional” poetry, for its use of personal experience and its direct way of speaking to the reader. Her first collection, The Colossus, came out in 1960. It was the only one published in her lifetime.

From October 1962, separated from Hughes, she wrote most of the Ariel poems in a matter of weeks. In December she moved to London with their two children, to a house where Yeats had once lived. The Bell Jar came out in January 1963 under a pen name, Victoria Lucas, to little notice. Plath took her own life on 11 February 1963, aged 30. Ariel appeared in 1965 in an order rearranged by Hughes, and her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

Read Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004), which puts the poems back in the order Plath left them. Read them aloud to hear the rhyme and alliteration, then go on to the novel.