Confessional poetry's fiercest voice burned brief
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) helped define confessional poetry with The Colossus, Ariel, and The Bell Jar, published a month before her death at thirty. In 1982 her Collected Poems won a posthumous Pulitzer—only the fourth poet ever so honored after death.
Born 27 October 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Boston, to Austrian-descended Aurelia and Prussian-born entomologist Otto Plath, who wrote a 1934 bumblebee book, Sylvia moved to Winthrop in 1936 near Point Shirley grandparents. Otto died 5 November 1940 of untreated diabetes complications after mistaking his illness for cancer—days after her eighth birthday—shaping the empty-sky grief of later poems including "Electra on Azalea Path." Wellesley years brought a Boston Herald children's poem at eight, journals at eleven, a 1947 Scholastic art award, and a Christian Science Monitor national publication just after Bradford Senior High (1950).
At Smith College she edited The Smith Review and spent a disillusioning Mademoiselle guest-editorship in New York that later fed The Bell Jar. After missing Dylan Thomas and a Harvard seminar rejection, early ECT and an 24 August 1953 overdose under her mother's porch led to six months' psychiatric care paid partly by Olive Higgins Prouty. She returned to graduate summa cum laude in 1955 with a Dostoyevsky double thesis, Phi Beta Kappa, and reported IQ around 160. A Fulbright took her to Newnham College, Cambridge. She met Ted Hughes on 25 February 1956 at a St. Botolph's Review party; they married 16 June at St George the Martyr, Holborn—Bloomsday—with only her mother witnessing.
Smith teaching, Boston's Willow Street years, and Robert Lowell's 1959 seminar with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck pushed her toward confessional directness. Yaddo taught her "to be true to my own weirdnesses." Back in London at Chalcot Square, Frieda was born 1 April 1960; The Colossus appeared that October. After a 1961 miscarriage and finishing The Bell Jar, they moved to Devon; Nicholas was born 17 January 1962; bee-keeping seeded a poem sequence. Separation came in 1962. She died in London on 11 February 1963 after lifelong depression and traumatic early ECT—leaving Ariel and a myth of blighted female genius that feminists claimed and critics still argue over.
Source: Sylvia Plath
