Sylvia Plath

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Standard Name: Plath, Sylvia
Birth Name: Sylvia Plath
Married Name: Sylvia Hughes
SP was primarily a poet, and most famously a confessional poet, although she also wrote a novel, a radio play, short stories and a book for children. She is best known for the poems she wrote in the last eighteen months that she lived. Her life story, complete with her suicide at the age of thirty, tends to overshadow her literary achievement, although critics of recent decades have made strides towards preserving her literary contribution and promoting its value.
Black-and-white photo portrait of Sylvia Plath, looking directly at the camera and seated in front of bookshelves.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Residence Fleur Adcock
FA , re-migrating as an adult from New Zealand to London, arrived there a week after the suicide of Sylvia Plath .
Vincent, Sally. “Final touch”. Guardian Unlimited.
Adcock, Fleur. Poems: 1960-2000. Bloodaxe Books.
final page
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Fleur Adcock
Again her introduction is interesting and trenchant. She observes that the early twentieth century already feels remote. Her selection runs from Charlotte Mew (born in 1869) to a clutch of women a little over thirty:...
Textual Features Gillian Allnutt
In the The Talking PrincessGA grapples with the challenges of finding and asserting the female voice: I woke / and begged one question of my adoring prince. / Would he accord my dream...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Gillian Allnutt
According to The Feminist Companion, Beginning the Avocadoexemplifies GA 's imagistic precision in poems about war, women writers (Virginia Woolf , Sylvia Plath ) and the act of writing..
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Textual Features Gillian Allnutt
In the poemWhy NotGA ponders the relationship between women's writing, the ambiguity of language, and the seduction of suicide. The speaker (presumably GA ) imaginatively places herself in the subject-position of Virginia Woolf
Literary responses Elizabeth Bishop
Sylvia Plath , who began with negative comments about EB , later developed admiration for her fine originality, always surprising, never rigid, flowing, juicier than Marianne Moore who is her godmother.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. “Writing ELIZABETH”. Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott, Bloodaxe Books, pp. 42-62.
44
Fleur Adcock notes...
Intertextuality and Influence Emily Brontë
Feminist literary critic Sandra M. Gilbert responded to both Emilies in one of her poetic collections: Emily's Bread (1984), and Anne Carson to EB , her favourite author and main fear, which I mean to...
Intertextuality and Influence Brigid Brophy
One of the twelve sections is no more fifty words. The novel's decadent style inhabits the minds of several characters, particularly that of the tall, fragile, perpetually exhausted but secretly sexually voracious Antonia Mount. Her...
Literary responses Leonora Carrington
In her 2017 assessment Marina Warner likens the text, as a testament to the horrors of psychosis and convulsive drug therapy that is split between visionary illumination and profound psychological distress, to such writing as...
Textual Features Leonora Carrington
LC 's text adapts the story of Judith and Holofernes and includes several more characters whose names also come from the Bible version. In addition to the widow Judith, it features her father, Issachar (in...
Intertextuality and Influence Gillian Clarke
Her volume opens with a poem, Baby Sitting, which voices a guilty unwillingness to respond to a child's demands; M. Wynn Thomas thinks this a response to the angrier, rawer Morning Song which opens...
Literary responses Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan , however, applies a withering pen to WC in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Textual Production Jeni Couzyn
The other poets included are Kathleen Raine , Denise Levertov , Elizabeth Jennings , Elaine Feinstein , Ruth Fainlight , Sylvia Plath , Jenny Joseph , Anne Stevenson , and Fleur Adcock .
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Jeni Couzyn
Her brief essay on Stevie Smith stresses originality, and also the omnipresence in Smith's poems of Death, as a presence not avoided but courted. Her even briefer piece on Sylvia Plath notes the tendency of...
Textual Features Jennifer Dawson
The title (not the one under which it was first submitted) strikingly anticipates that of Sylvia Plath 's The Bell Jar, 1963, with its image of an invisible barrier separating the protagonist from the...

Timeline

1866: The Royal Society of Arts established a scheme...

National or international item

1866

The Royal Society of Arts established a scheme (believed to be the first in the world) for setting up commemorative plaques on buildings associated with famous people.
Quinn, Ben. “Plaque blues. Cuts hit heritage scheme”. Guardian Weekly, p. 16.

Early 1936: The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by...

Writing climate item

Early 1936

The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts (who was put forward for this task by T. S. Eliot ), set out to define the modern movement, not just chronologically but according...

1948: The University of London appointed Professor...

Building item

1948

The University of London appointed Professor Lilian Penson vice-chancellor, the first time a woman held this position at a British university.

18 October 1998: Ten days before Poet Laureate Ted Hughes...

Writing climate item

18 October 1998

Ten days before Poet Laureate Ted Hughes died, the Sunday Times carried his poem entitled The Offers, which he had excluded from both his books published this year, Birthday Letters (his last major collection)...

28 October 1998: Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate and widower of...

Writing climate item

28 October 1998

Ted Hughes , Poet Laureate and widower of Sylvia Plath , died.
The Ted Hughes Homepage. http://web.archive.org/web/20091028202301/http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/THHome.htm.

10 September 2003: Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of...

Writing climate item

10 September 2003

Guardian Unlimited Books named as Site of the Week a website entitled Poetry Landmarks of Britain: a map of poetic assocations plotted on an interactive map of Britain, searchable by region or category.

May 2009: The BBC aimed to demonstrate that poetry...

Writing climate item

May 2009

The BBC aimed to demonstrate that poetry is for everyone in a series launched this month: it succeeded in that sales of poetry soared in Britain.

6 October 2010: A previously unknown poem by Ted Hughes,...

Writing climate item

6 October 2010

A previously unknown poem by Ted Hughes , Last Letter, became available to the public when it was read on the BBC 's Channel 4 News by Jonathan Pryce .
Kennedy, Maev. “Unknown poem reveals Ted Hughes’ torment over death of Sylvia Plath”. The Guardian.

Texts

Plath, Sylvia. A Winter Ship. Tragara Press, 1960.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Faber and Faber.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. Harper and Row.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. Faber and Faber, 2004.
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. Editor Hughes, Ted, Faber and Faber, 1981.
Plath, Sylvia. Crossing the Water. Faber and Faber.
Plath, Sylvia. Crystal Gazer and Other Poems. Rainbow Press.
Plath, Sylvia. “Ennui”. Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts, Vol.
5
, No. 2.
Plath, Aurelia, and Sylvia Plath. “Introduction”. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 3-40.
Hughes, Ted, and Sylvia Plath. “Introduction”. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Harper and Row, 1979, pp. 1-9.
Hughes, Ted, and Sylvia Plath. “Introduction”. Collected Poems, Faber and Faber, pp. 13-17.
Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Editor Hughes, Ted, Harper and Row, 1979.
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963. Editor Plath, Aurelia, Harper and Row.
Plath, Sylvia. Letters of Sylvia Plath. Editors Kukil, Karen and Peter K. Steinberg, Faber and Faber, 2017.
Plath, Sylvia. Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems. Editor Hughes, Ted, Faber and Faber.
Plath, Sylvia, and Quentin Blake. The Bed Book. Faber and Faber.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Heinemann.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper and Row.
Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus and Other Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 1967.
Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus: Poems. Heinemann.
Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Editors Hughes, Ted and Frances McCullough, Dial.
Plath, Sylvia. Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices. Turret Books, 1968.
Plath, Sylvia. Winter Trees. Faber and Faber.