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Sylvia Plath

American poet and writer (1932–1963)

  • Fame70.7
  • Momentum0.6
  • Wikipedia147K
Source-basedStable
Lived 1932–1963, aged 31United States
United States flagUnited StatesWritersWriter / Author
  • Wikipedia
    84 languages
    Cross-language footprint
  • Era
    1932–1963
    Aged 31
  • Known for
    The Bell Jar
    1979
Summary
Updated 2026-06-09

She turned her depression, her marriage, and her unraveling into a new kind of poetry—raw, direct, unsparing—then died at thirty, one month after her only novel appeared. The work that made her a Pulitzer winner arrived eighteen years after her suicide.

Biography

About

Born in Boston in 1932, Plath graduated from Smith College and won a Fulbright to Cambridge, where she met and married poet Ted Hughes in 1956. After a brief return to the States—including a seminar with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton that crystallized the confessional style—she moved back to England in 1959. Her first collection, The Colossus, came in 1960; by then she had two children and a marriage fraying under what unpublished letters to her therapist later revealed as physical and emotional abuse. She'd fought severe depression and brutal early electroconvulsive treatments for years. In 1…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath
said
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
— Ch. 1, Opening line
Sylvia Plath
said
The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.
— Ch. 2
Sylvia Plath
said
There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
— Ch. 2
Sylvia Plath
said
What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?
— "Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices" (1962), a radio play published in 1968
Sylvia Plath
said
So many of us! So many of us! We are shelves, we areTables, we are meek, We are edible, Nudgers and shoversIn spite of ourselves.
— "Mushrooms"
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Where to find them

Platforms

By the numbers

Score breakdown

The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.

Fame
Stable
70.7
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Momentum0.6
Historical29.3
Now attention2.3
Source confidence65.0
Completeness75.0
Global rank
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Country rank
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Category rank
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Receipts

Sources

  • Wikipedia
    wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
    High confidence
  • Wikidata
    wikidata · wikidata.org
    High confidence
  • Pantheon 2.0
    database · pantheon.world
    High confidence