Salon.com > Sylvia Plath

“On the Decline of Oracles”

Mon, 19 Mar 2001 21:11:00 +0000

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston, and her work reflects both her New England heritage and the landscape of England where she later lived with her husband, poet Ted Hughes. What Hughes called her "crackling verbal energy" is apparent in her poems' biting precision of word and image. Gestures in her life of defiance and ecstasy, love or despair, are reimagined in brilliant archetypal patterns. In the year before her suicide, she was writing the poems that secured her fame -- poems about her children and her failed marriage, about death and her imagination.

"[Her poems] have that exquisite, heartbreaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares ... Her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her," wrote Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times.

Listen to two poems from the HarperAudio collection "Sylvia Plath reads."

Sylvia Plath

Thu, 05 Oct 2000 23:47:00 +0000

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) began publishing poems and stories by the time she entered Smith College in 1950. In 1955 she won a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge University, where she met writer Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. Plath was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for her Collected Poems. Her novel, "The Bell Jar," is a classic of American literature. This work chronicles the crackup of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, successful -- but slowly going under. Plath takes us with Esther through a month in New York as a contest-winning junior editor on a magazine. Her strained relationships eventually leading her to madness.

Such deep exploration of the psyche is rare in any novel. It points to the fact that "The Bell Jar" is a largely autobiographical work about Plath's own summer of 1953, when she was a guest editor at Mademoiselle and experienced a breakdown.

"McDormand gives a sensitive, intimate performance. Her dry, ironic tone, covering up for an undercurrent of fear, perfectly capturesthe character of Esther." -Billboard Magazine

Listen now to an excerpt of the Bell Jar, read by Frances McDormand and courtesy of HarperAudio.

Sylvia Plath

Thu, 05 Oct 2000 18:00:00 +0000

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was born in Boston and her work reflected both her New England heritage and the landscape of England where she later lived with her husband, the poet Ted Hughes. What Hughes called "her crackling verbal energy" is apparent in her poems' biting precision of word and image. Gestures in her life of defiance and ecstasy, love or despair, are re-imagined in brilliant archetypal patterns. In the year before her suicide, she was writing the poems that secured her fame--poems about her children and her failed marriage, about death and her imagination.

"[Her poems] have that exquisite, heart-breaking quality about them that has made Sylvia Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares... Her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her." -Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times

Listen to archival recordings, part of Random House Audio's Voice of the Poet series.