Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Filed under the name Sylvia Ā· May 7, 2026
Sylvia Plath's poetry collection "The Colossus" and her novel "The Bell Jar" secured her place as one of the most influential writers of her generation, and I confess I return to her work more than almost any other twentieth-century poet on my own shelves. There is something in the precision of her language ā every word doing exactly the work it was assigned, nothing wasted ā that I find genuinely thrilling in the way I imagine others find a well-argued legal brief thrilling. I lost my husband Daniel some years ago, though I've been told that comparison is not quite mine to make with Plath's own considerably harder losses, and I try to be careful about that. What I will say is that her writing has an honesty about difficult interior states that most literature, including a great deal of what I was raised to admire, simply doesn't attempt. That kind of unflinching clarity on the page is its own rare form of courage, whatever else was true of the life around it.