Sylvia Plath Day

What the day is

Sylvia Plath Day is observed on October 27, her birthday. She was born in Boston in 1932 and is among the most widely read American poets of the twentieth century.

Origin and background

Plath studied at Smith College and then at Cambridge on a Fulbright, where she met and married the English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Her first collection appeared in 1960, and her only novel, a sharp and frequently very funny account of a young woman's breakdown, was published in early 1963 under a pen name.

The work everything rests on came in a short burst. Through late 1962, writing in the early mornings before her two young children woke, she produced the poems collected as Ariel. They are ferocious, exact, controlled to the syllable, and often much wittier than their reputation allows. She knew what she had; her letters from that autumn say so plainly.

She died by suicide in February 1963, at thirty. That fact has dominated her reception ever since, and it flattens her. The poems are not a long suicide note. They are the work of a technically dazzling writer at the height of her powers, and reading them only backward from the ending misses most of what is in them.

Two editorial matters are worth knowing. Hughes, as her literary executor, arranged the published Ariel in a different order from the manuscript she left, removing some poems and adding others. A restored edition in 2004 printed her own sequence, which reads noticeably differently and ends on a different note. He also acknowledged destroying the last volume of her journals.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, almost twenty years after her death.

Anyone who finds this subject difficult can reach a crisis line in their own country.

How to take part

• Read the poems before reading about her life. The order matters.
• Read the restored edition of Ariel in her own sequence.
• Read her journals and letters, which are funny and ambitious and startlingly ordinary.
• Read one poem aloud. The sound is doing half the work and is lost on the page.
• Resist the biography-first reading, which is the one she is most often given.