Life & Background
Plath was born in Boston in 1932 to a German-born entomologist father, who died when she was eight, and an Austrian-American mother who taught. She was an outstanding student and a driven one, publishing from her teens, winning a scholarship to Smith College and a guest editorship at Mademoiselle in New York — the summer behind The Bell Jar. A Fulbright took her to Cambridge, where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes in 1956. They lived in America and then Devon, and had two children. The marriage broke down in 1962 after Hughes's affair, and Plath moved to a London flat with the children during an exceptionally severe winter, writing the Ariel poems at extraordinary speed in the early mornings. She died by suicide in February 1963, at thirty. Ariel was published posthumously in 1965 in an order Hughes selected.
Ariel
Ariel is the collection written mostly in the last months of Plath's life and published two years after her death. It contains Daddy, which addresses the dead father through the deliberately shocking imagery of fascism and its victims; Lady Lazarus, spoken by a woman who performs her own repeated resurrection as a sideshow act and warns that she eats men like air; the title poem, a horse-ride at dawn that becomes a headlong dissolution into speed and light; the bee sequence drawn from her father's field and her own hives in Devon; and quieter poems such as Morning Song, on her newborn child, and Edge. Hughes reordered the manuscript and omitted some poems; a restored edition following Plath's own arrangement appeared in 2004.
Plath is usually placed with Lowell and Sexton in the confessional school, but the label undersells the craft: the poems are metrically tight, heavily patterned in sound, and spoken by constructed personae rather than by an unmediated self. Their method is the sudden, violent metaphor — domestic objects turned instruments, the self described from outside as an object or a performance. The Holocaust imagery in Daddy has drawn sustained criticism, from George Steiner onwards, for appropriating historical atrocity to private grief, and defences that read the images as a study in the language of victimhood rather than a claim to it. The Bell Jar, published a month before her death under a pseudonym, covers similar material in a flatter, more satirical register.
Why Plath Matters
Plath's Ariel changed what the lyric could sound like, and her influence on subsequent poetry — particularly in the voicing of anger and of women's experience — is enormous. She won the Pulitzer posthumously in 1982, one of very few poets to do so. Her work is central to feminist criticism, and the editorial history of her manuscripts, controlled by Hughes as executor, is a much-studied case in the politics of posthumous publication. Reading her strictly through her biography is the most common critical error, and examiners tend to reward answers that resist it.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- The Colossus1960
- The Bell Jar1963
- Ariel1965
- Crossing the Water1971
- Winter Trees1971
- Collected Poems1981
- The Journals1982, 2000