"I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, My own blue razor rusting in my throat, O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend, It was my love that did us both to death." The Colossus

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Massachussetts, USA and attended Smith College. She suffered from manic depression throughout most of her adult life and an early suicide attempt landed her in mental hospitals where she underwent electroshock therapy. She later went to Cambridge University, England where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. After an acrimonious breakup with Hughes, she committed suicide in London. Her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar recounts her first suicide attempt.

Selected Poems

• Spinster
• The Moon And The Yew Tree
• Mirror
• The Hanging Man
• Poppies In October

Worthy Web Links

• Voices and Visions - Sylvia Plath
• Poems from the Planet Earth - the closest thing to a "Collected Poems" site that I've seen.
• Sylvia Plath at the Uni of N.Carolina.
• Poetic Conversations - Modernism
• Sylvia Plath
• Reflections on The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Biographie de Sylvia Plath par Anne Mauger, Club de Poetes (in French)

"Tragedy is not a woman, however gifted, dragging her shadow around in a circle, or analysing with dazzling scrupulosity the stale, boring inertia of the circle; tragedy is cultural, mysteriously enlarging the individual so that what he has experienced is both what we have experienced and what we need not experience - because of his, or her, private agony. It is proper for us to say that Sylvia Plath represents for us a tragic figure involved in a tragic action, and that her tragedy is offered to us as a near-perfect work of art, in her books."

(Joyce Carol Oates)