“I failed her on that level. I was 30 years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression?”
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Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and her works include The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. Her poems show womanhood in a very different manner than her contemporaries. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, wh…
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culture · American poet and writer (1932–1963) · poet · writer · novelist · essayist · autobiographer · diarist · children's writer · draftsperson · librettist · also Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath Hughes, Victoria Lucas, Plath
Born 27 October 1932 · Died 11 February 1963 · Q133054
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2026· 13 entries
“I want Books and Babies and Beef stews”
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“According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner”
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“to be true to my own weirdnesses”
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Esquire: He leído ‘La campana de cristal’ al menos diez veces y no sé si estoy preparada para ver a Billie Eilish como Sylvia Plath
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Le Monde: Sylvia Plath's lost novel
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El Imparcial: ¿De qué trata The Bell Jar? Así luce Billie Eilish en la novela de Sylvia Plath
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MiscelAna: Billie Eilish Will Play Esther in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
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Sleek Magazine: “The Girl Who Wanted to Be God”: Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift
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ELLE: Billie Eilish Will Star in a Film Adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar
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The Economic Times: Quote of the day by Sylvia Plath: 'When we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously...' Inspiring life lessons on self-awareness, inner peace and ...
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Public attention spiked: 12,739 Wikipedia readers in one day, 3.9× the usual 3,294, with 1 article edits. Editors noted: add missing space after period
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The Guardian: ‘I want my career, my children and a free supple life’: Sylvia Plath’s radical reinvention
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2025· 2 entries
The Guardian: From Dylan Thomas’ shopping list to a note from Sylvia Plath’s doctor: newly uncovered case files reveal the hidden lives of famous writers
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The Guardian: ‘Ambition is a punishing sphere for women’: author Maggie Nelson on why Taylor Swift is the Sylvia Plath of her generation
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2024· 3 entries
The Guardian: Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake review – a writer’s place is not in the kitchen
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Snopes rated the claim “U.S. poet Sylvia Plath once said, “Opinions are like orgasms… mine matters most and I really don't care if you have one.”” Incorrect Attribution.
Shown as reported and rated by a fact checker, not as an established fact.
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Faber published a new volume titled The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K
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2023· 3 entries
The Guardian: I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me
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The Guardian: Poets’ dress code: what the clothes of Sylvia Plath, Audre Lorde and Stevie Smith tell us about their inner lives
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The Guardian: ‘Her writing became a catalyst for my own’: the power of Sylvia Plath
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2022· 3 entries
The Guardian: Euphoria by Elin Cullhed review – inside the mind of Sylvia Plath
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The Guardian: Where to start with: Sylvia Plath
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Yahoo: How Sylvia Plath’s secret miscarriage transforms our understanding of her poetry
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2021· 1 entry
New York Post: Sylvia Plath’s love letters to Ted Hughes up for sale at Sotheby’s
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2020· 1 entry
Yahoo: Review: Think you know Sylvia Plath? Read this definitive new biography
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2018· 1 entry
The New York Times published an obituary for Plath as part of the Overlooked history project
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2017· 1 entry
And 2018, two new volumes of letters, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956 and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956–1963, edited by Peter K
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2013· 1 entry
A previously unseen draft of her poem "Sheep in Fog", written two weeks before her death, revealed her disturbed state of mind
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2010· 1 entry
For example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatisation" and of self-pity
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2009· 1 entry
Plath's son Nicholas Hughes, who was a fisheries biologist, died by suicide at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, following a history of depression
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2006· 1 entry
Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled "Ennui"
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2004· 2 entries
The Independent in London published an article which ranked Ariel as the third best book of modern poetry among its Ten Best Modern Poetry Books
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The Independent published an article that ranked Ariel as the 3rd best book of modern poetry among 'The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books'
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2003· 2 entries
Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother", first published in Tatler:
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That the typescript may have consisted of the first two chapters, and did not exceed sixty pages
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2001· 1 entry
That the anti-depressants prescribed were a "key factor" in Plath's suicide
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2000· 1 entry
Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
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1998· 2 entries
Hughes published Birthday Letters that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath
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Shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V
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1989· 3 entries
Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sy
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With Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian and The Independent
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“The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace”
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1982· 3 entries
Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1982).
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Making her the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously
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When Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death
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1981· 2 entries
Edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death
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Which included previously unpublished works
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1979· 2 entries
Was produced into a film directed by Larry Peerce and starring Marilyn Hassett as 'Esther'
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Plath left behind a typescript of "some 130 pages", but in 1995 he spoke of just "sixty, seventy pages"
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1977· 1 entry
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a collection of short stories, other prose writings and diary excerpts was published by Faber & Faber
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1975· 1 entry
Edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath
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1971· 1 entry
The volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including nine previously unseen poems from the original manuscript of Ariel
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1969· 1 entry
This practice intensified, as Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill
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1965· 1 entry
That precipitated Plath's rise to fame and helped establish her reputation as one of the 20th century's best poets
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1963· 23 entries
Died 1963-02-11.
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Under her real name in 1966, and in the US in 1971
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“A ja kocham twoją głupotę,Jej ślepe zwierciadło.Spoglądam w nieI odnajduję własną twarz,myślisz, że to zabawne.To dobrze.”
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“Bóg stworzył jeden świat, a człowiek drugi.”
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“Doskonałość jest straszna, nie ma potomstwa.”
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“Doskonały lęk oczyszcza duszę.”
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“I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.What ever you see I swallow immediatelyJust as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful— The eye of a little god, four-cornered. (ang.)”
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“Every woman adores a Fascist. (ang.)”
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“Księżyc to nie drzwi przecież. Tylko twarz własna,blada jak pięść człowiecza gniewnie zaciśnięta.”
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“I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. (ang.)”
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“Me serce pod twą stopą, pokrewne kamieniom.”
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“Miłość jest treścią mego przekleństwa.”
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“Moje lustro zasnuwa się mgłą –Jeszcze kilka oddechów, a już niczego nie odbije.”
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“You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. (ang.)”
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“Niczym nieokreślony przestępcaUmieram na różne sposoby.”
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“Herr LuciferBewareBeware. Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air. (ang.)”
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“Pewne rzeczy tego świata są niestrawne.”
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“Potrzebuję ojca. Potrzebuję matki. Potrzebuję starszej, mądrzejszej osoby, do której mogłabym płakać. Rozmawiam z Bogiem, ale niebo jest puste.”
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“Pragnę być tym, czym byłam,Zanim łóżko i zanim nóż,Agrafa ozdobna i maśćUjęły mnie jak w nawias;Chcę koni płynących na wietrze,Miejsca i czasu poza umysłem.”
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“Swój czas poślubiłam cieniowi.”
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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”
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After The Bell Jar was published, Plath began working on another literary work, titled Double Exposure, which was never published
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“And I Am the arrow,The dew that fliesSuicidal. (ang.)”
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1962· 1 entry
“Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices”
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1960· 1 entry
And in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry
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1959· 2 entries
When she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and s
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Plath took a creative writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck
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1957· 1 entry
Briefly moved to the United States, but moved back to England in the winter of 1959
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1956· 2 entries
At St George the Martyr in Holborn, London, and in honor of Bloomsday, with Plath's mother as the sole witness
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At a party to launch a poetry journal, St
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1955· 2 entries
Awarded Glascock Prize (1955).
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Won the Glascock Prize for her poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea"
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1953· 1 entry
By crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills
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1950· 2 entries
Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she excelled academically
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Were published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor
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1944· 1 entry
At the age of 11 and continued until her death by suicide in February 1963
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1940· 1 entry
A week and a half after his daughter's eighth birthday, of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes
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1936· 1 entry
The family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts
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1935· 1 entry
Plath's brother Warren Joseph was born
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1932· 1 entry
Born 1932-10-27.
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