Book description
When Sylvia Plath's Ariel was published posthumously, A. Alvarez in
the Observer wrote: 'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and
destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and
also unusually clever, sardonic, hard-minded . . . They are works of
great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity
. . . the book is a major literary event'. This selection made by Ted
Hughes from all her work shows that Sylvia Plath is clearly a major
poet of the twentieth century.
Sylvia Plath (1932-63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied
at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a
Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She
published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960),
and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains
her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was
born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published
in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry
and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the
Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of
poetry, Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was Poet
Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.
