Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story

y writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963.[4] Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy. Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.[5]

Works
Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, a poem that appeared in the Boston Traveller. [6]By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over fifty short stories and published in a raft of magazines.[45] At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. She edited the college magazine Mademoiselle and on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea. Later at Newnham, Cambridge, she wrote for the Varsity magazine. By the time Heinmann published her first collection, The Colossus and other poems in the UK in late in 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in Harper's, The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in The Colossus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with The New Yorker.[46] It was however her 1966 collection Ariel, published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests. In 1971, the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including previously unseen nine poems from the original manuscript of Ariel. [28] The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first poet to win the prize posthumously. [28] In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled Ennui. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.

Journals and letters

Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of The Bell Jar in America. [28] Plath had kept a diary from the age of 11 until her death, doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death

The Colossus and Other Poems

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The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, named after the poem The Colossus. It was first published in 1960.

[edit] Contents
The 44 poems presented here are in the published order
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. The Manor Garden Two Views of a Cadaver Room Night Shift Sow The Eye-mote Hardcastle Crags Faun Departure The Colossus Lorelei Point Shirley The Bull of Bendylaw All the Dead Dears Aftermath The Thin People Suicide Off Egg Rock Mushrooms I Want, I Want Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows The Ghost's Leavetaking A Winter Ship Full Fathom Five Blue Moles Strumpet Song Man in Black Snakecharmer The Hermit at Outermost House The Disquieting Muses Medallion The Companionable Ills Moonrise Spinster Frog Autumn Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor The Beekeeper's Daughter

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

The Times Are Tidy The Burnt-out Spa Sculptor Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond The Stones

The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search For the scientific apparatus, see bell jar. For the 1979 film, see The Bell Jar (film).

The Bell Jar is American writer and poet Sylvia Plath's only novel, which was originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963. The novel is semi-autobiographical with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman clef, with the protagonist's descent into mental illness paralleling Plath's own experiences with what may have been clinical depression. Plath committed suicide a month after its first UK publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, pursuant to the wishes of Plath's husband Ted Hughes and her mother.[1]

Parallels of Plath's life to the novel

The book contains many references to real people and events in Plath's life. Plath's real-life magazine scholarship was at Mademoiselle magazine beginning in 1953.[2] Furthermore, Philomena Guinea is based on Plath's own patron, Olive Higgins Prouty, author of Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager, who funded Plath's scholarship to study at Smith College. Plath was rejected from a Harvard course taught by Frank O'Connor.[3] Dr. Nolan is thought to be based on Plath's own therapist, Ruth Beuscher, whom she continued seeing into adulthood. A good portion of this part of the novel closely resembles the experiences chronicled by Mary Jane Ward in her autobiographical novel The Snake Pit; Plath later stated that she'd seen reviews of The Snake Pit and believed the public wanted to see "mental health stuff," so she deliberately based details of Esther's hospitalization on the procedures and methods outlined in Ward's book. Plath was a patient at McLean Hospital, an upscale facility which resembled the "snake pit" much less than certain wards in Metropolitan State Hospital, which may have been where Mary Jane Ward was actually hospitalized.

Ariel (book)
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Ariel is the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published, in 1965, two years after her death by suicide; most of the poems included in it had been selected by her. The poems in Ariel, with their free flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, mark a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier, Colossus poems.[1] The distinction often cited by critics between the two books, The Colossus and Ariel is that there's something much swifter, more abrupt, more sardonic about the latter.

Contents (1965 version)

Poems marked with an * were not in Plath's original manuscript, but were added by Ted Hughes. Most of them date from the last few weeks of Plath's life. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. Morning Song The Couriers Sheep in Fog * The Applicant Lady Lazarus Tulips Cut Elm The Night Dances Poppies in October Berck-Plage Ariel Death & Co. Lesbos - (This poem is censored in some conservative publications) Nick and the Candlestick Gulliver Getting There Medusa The Moon and the Yew Tree A Birthday Present Mary's Song * (only in US version) Letter in November The Rival Daddy You're Fever 103 The Bee Meeting The Arrival of the Bee Box Stings The Swarm * (only in US version) Wintering The Hanging Man * Little Fugue * Years * The Munich Mannequins Totem * Paralytic * Balloons * Poppies in July * Kindness * Contusion * Edge * Words *

[edit] Additional poems in her manuscript

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. The Rabbit Catcher Thalidomide Barren Woman A Secret The Jailer The Detective Magi The Other Stopped Dead The Courage of Shutting-Up Purdah Amnesiac Wuthering Heights

Works
[edit] Poetry collections

The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) Ariel (19611965) Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968) Crossing the Water (1971) Winter Trees (1971) The Collected Poems (1981) Selected Poems (1985) Plath: Poems (1998) Sylvia Plath Reads, Harper Audio (2000) (Audio)

[edit] Collected prose and novels

The Bell Jar: A novel (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" Letters Home: Correspondence 19501963 (1975) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977) The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) The Magic Mirror (published 1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

[edit] Children's books

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