Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight. At Smith College she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. She edited the college magazine
Mademoiselle and on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for
Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea. Later at Newnham, Cambridge, she wrote for the
Varsity magazine. By the time Heinmann published her first collection,
Colossus and other poems in the UK in late in 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in
Harper's,
The Spectator and the
Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in
Colossus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with
The New Yorker.
Colossus received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting her voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at
Punch called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse". Bernard Bergonzi at the
Manchester Guardian said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso' quality". From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published America in 1962 to less glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets. Some later critics have described the first book as somewhat young, staid or conventional in comparison to the more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.
Confessional writing
The poems in
Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. It is a possibility Robert Lowell's poetry played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's poem
Life Studies as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death. Posthumously published in 1966, The impact of
Ariel was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as
Tulips,
Daddy and
Lady Lazarus. Plath's work is often held within the genre of Confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other confessional contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez, who has written about her extensively, writes of her later work:
Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick - everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life.
In an interview with
The Paris Review in 1971, Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton was asked if they had ever talked about suicide. She replied:
Often, very often. Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth...between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story. It is a wonder we didn’t depress George [Starbuck] with our egocentricity; instead, I think, we three were stimulated by it...even George...as if death made each of us a little more real at the moment.
Impact
Time and
Life both reviewed the slim volume of
Ariel in the wake of her death.
Time said:
Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. [...] Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, Daddy and Lady Lazarus, fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder."
Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Writer Honor Moore describes
Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement...Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper"...certain and audacious. Moore says:
When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified.
Later posthumous collections
In 1971, the volumes
Winter Trees and
Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including previously unseen nine poems from the original manuscript of
Ariel. The
Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the first poet to win the prize posthumously. In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled
Ennui. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in
Blackbird, the online journal.