Sylvia Plath 101

Tracing the poetics of a lyrical genius

By Benjamin Voigt

More than 50 years after her death, Sylvia Plath's poetry still seems inseparable from the details of her life. This is in part because her reputation is built on them: though well established as a writer during her lifetime, her posthumous work, published after (and inevitably colored by) her suicide in 1963, made her famous. It need not have, however. Technically dazzling, intensely felt, and, as critic Helen Vendler notes, "demonically intelligent," Plath's poems stand all on their own. Though influenced by (and often categorized with) confessional poets such as Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton, Plath does not so much confess in her work as confront. Her blistering, feminist songs of despair challenge not only conventional notions of motherhood and womanhood but also reality itself. Her work makes profoundly interior and sometimes disturbing experiences real and lyrical and, in doing so, reminds us of the depths of our own subjectivity.

Check out the full poem sampler on the Poetry Foundation website.