sylvia plath
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Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the Early Years
‘Marriage is my medium,’ he wrote. ‘You have no idea what a happy life Sylvia and I lead.’ Salon has an exclusive look into the early (and happy) days of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
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The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
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Sylvia Plath and Race
Why Plath? People are surprised or disappointed or embarrassed when I automatically cite her as one of my writing influences, one of my life influences. I think it’s because of the stigma of suicide and ingrained bias. She’s a polarizing…
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It Should Have Ended With Bees
Plath chose to end her Ariel with four of the five-poem sequence Hughes buried in the middle, the so-called “bee poems.” When Sylvia Plath died, her husband Ted Hughes rearranged the poems in Ariel, Plath’s most famous collection, to reflect his…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
This Sunday, Ted Wilson turned five. Happy anniversary, Ted! In the latest “Last Book I Loved,” Michelle King finds a kindred spirit in Sylvia Plath, who, the first time she kissed husband Ted Hughes, allegedly bit his cheek and drew blood.…
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The Last Book I Loved: The Silent Woman
I had recently broken all of my wine glasses. I did not break them all at the same time. Some I broke while cleaning, and I was upset that I had managed to destroy something while trying to make it…
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Sylvia Plath, Content at the Mall
Like most of her peers, Plath relished consumerism; on her weekends off in New York, “she went straight to Bloomingdale’s in search of another pair of black pumps.” Here’s to another reminder that the mythology can obscure the truth. While…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 9
Becoming a poet means writing past the danger each and every time you feel that you’re struggling with writing a poem.
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The Pie Lady’s Manifesto
During the first meeting with the man who would become my cookbook editor, I said “I’m not going to write another sweet little book about pie.”
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Listen to Sylvia Plath Read Her Poems Out Loud
Open Culture’s Josh Jones suggests listening to Sylvia Plath perform her poems out loud as a way to encounter them anew, “without the morbid celebrity baggage Plath’s name carries.” They do seem, in some ways, like completely different poems when…
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From Your Mother
Sylvia Plath is known as a writer and a poet, but she almost became a visual artist instead. Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, who is also a painter and a poet, has created a book out of more than forty of…
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Sylvia Plath Inspires Adoration, Scorn
Sylvia Plath has always been a polarizing figure, a fact underscored by the reaction to editions of her work recently released to mark fifty years since her death. Are her poems humorless or funny to the point of kitschiness? Was…