Poet
Sylvia Plath
American poet · 1932–1963
Sylvia Plath wrote the poems that made her immortal in the last months of her life, rising at four in the morning in a freezing London flat — "that still, blue, almost eternal hour," she called it — while her two children slept. She died by suicide in February 1963 at 30; the collection Ariel, published two years later, changed American poetry.
A Fulbright scholar at Cambridge, she met the English poet Ted Hughes at a party in 1956 and married him four months later; the marriage's collapse fuels the controlled fury of the late poems. Her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar appeared under a pseudonym a month before her death.
In 1982 her Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize — the first ever awarded posthumously for poetry.
Sylvia Plath's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Daddy1962
You do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoe
Perhaps the most notorious poem of the twentieth century: a daughter's exorcism of her dead father, conducted in nursery-rhyme rhythms that make its Holocaust imagery and rage more shocking, not less. Plath read it on the BBC weeks before her death, calling its speaker 'a girl with an Electra complex' — a character, not simply herself. Critics have argued about its borrowed atrocity imagery for sixty years, which is part of its terrible power.
Read the full poem →Lady Lazarus1962
DyingIs an art, like everything else.
The speaker presents her own survived suicide attempts as a carnival act — 'the big strip tease' — performed for a peanut-crunching crowd, with herself as both victim and headliner. The famous lines excerpted here are delivered with a showman's cold pride. The poem ends in threat rather than despair: she rises from the ash 'and I eat men like air.'
Read the full poem →Mirror1961
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
The mirror itself speaks — 'not cruel, only truthful' — and watches a woman search its surface daily for the girl she was, finding instead an old woman rising toward her 'like a terrible fish.' Giving the poem to the object rather than the woman is the masterstroke: the mirror cannot flatter, and neither will the poem. It is Plath's most anthologized treatment of time and self-image.
Read the full poem →Morning Song1961
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The opening poem of Ariel is, surprisingly to new readers, a poem about a newborn — wonder and estrangement held in the same hand, the new mother feeling 'no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror.' By the end she is stumbling to the night feeding, 'cow-heavy,' as the baby's cry 'rises like balloons.' It shows the tenderness her fiercest poems can eclipse.
Read the full poem →Tulips1961
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Written after a hospital stay, the poem dramatizes the seduction of numbness: the white ward offers a peace 'so pure' that a gift of red tulips arrives like an intrusion of life itself, loud and demanding. The flowers gradually force the speaker's heart to reassert itself. Few poems render depression's logic — and its slow defeat — so precisely.
Read the full poem →Mad Girl's Love Song1953
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;I lift my lids and all is born again.
A villanelle written while Plath was still a college student, its two refrains alternating like a mind arguing with itself about whether a lost love — or the world itself — was ever real. The strict form contains the vertigo, barely. She published it in Mademoiselle during the summer her experiences would later feed The Bell Jar, and it remains a favorite gateway into her work.
Read the full poem →