Sylvia Plath (Critical Insights)

Talented from the very beginning of her life, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the ‘children’s section’ of the Boston Herald. She said of her childhood: ‘I want to work at putting together the complex mosaic of my childhood; to practice capturing feelings and experiences from the nebulous seething of memory and yank them out into black-and-white on the typewriter.’ Plath won several major prizes in writing and scholarship and her poems are considered today to be the most famous by an American female poet of the 20th Century, especially those in her 1965 collection Ariel.