Plath is widely considered one of the most emotionally evocative and compelling American poets of the postwar period. Although Plath gained only modest critical success during her lifetime, after her suicide at the age of thirty and the subsequent publication of her poetry collection Ariel (1965) she achieved widespread acclaim as a poet. This status was affirmed when Plath's posthumously published Collected Poems (1981) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. Plath also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled The Bell Jar (1963), which, like her poetry, reveals an intensely personal struggle with self-consciousness, bold metaphors for death and sexuality, and a pioneering examination of societal limitations experienced by women. A complicated literary personality whose biography is nearly impossible to disentangle from her writing, Plath has often been regarded as a confessional poet, though her deeply personal lamentations often achieve universality through mythic allusion and archetypal symbolism. Viewed as a cathartic...