In her typically fastidious fashion, Plath had early set herself the task of mastering the techniques of poets of Western literature. Having completed that self-imposed apprenticeship through her disciplined experimentation with such forms as the villanelle and the Petrarchan sonnet in the period before 1956, she turned to a new exploration of her own voice. That effort culminated in the poems that comprise the bulk of her first published collection
The Colossus (1960). Between the publication of that volume and her death, Plath wrote the mature work for which she is best known; at its best it is fiercely ironic, even comedic, intensely subjective, often ritualistic, and nearly always painful. Despite her efforts and successes as a poet, she herself once called poetry "an evasion from the real job of writing prose," and one of the professional tasks she set herself was to write clear "objective" narratives. It is not surprising, therefore, that the publication of works by Plath in the 1980s shows her to have been a prolific diarist, short story writer, and budding essayist who aspired to become a popular, highly paid, magazine- style short story writer and travel journalist.
Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to Aurelia Schober and Otto Emil Plath.
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