Sylvia Plath was a very controversial, confessional, poet in her day in age.  Publishing hundreds of poems, she has been adored and despised by thousands.  From her bold statements and direct manner she has become a “heroine to a generation of feminists who exploited her misery for their own purposes.”(Walsh, D.) She had many successes that started off at an early age, including books and other publications.  In modern day, there has been a movie intended to be a bibliography, no doubt a tribute as well, to the poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath called,” Sylvia” starring Gwyneth Paltrow but above all Sylvia Plath was an icon to woman everywhere, to speak their minds and not stay in the shadows. 

A new age poet in her day but today is known world-wide and adored for her awareness of and distaste for the submissive and insubstantial role of woman in the 1950s.  “No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement” and still today, at a time when the idea of equality for women isn't so radically revolutionary as it had been earlier in the century, Plath is a literary symbol of the women's rights movement.” (Kinsey-Clinton, M.) Plath was a strong woman and starting at an early age, had a very creative mind.  “By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote hundreds of poems." (Gilson, B.)

With many successes, Plath has a long wrap sheet of achievements.  (Enotes.) During the summer following her junior year at Smith, she had been a student “guest editor” at Mademoiselle Magazine.  During that time she nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. Sylvia Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. (Bio.True Story.  )She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963 and by twenty-eight, her first book, The Colossus, was published in England. (Literary Works.) She also has written, Crossing the Water. Plath's second posthumously published collection is made up of poems written in 1960 and 1961, after The Colossus. The poems are described by one reviewer as Plath's work between her “strange precocity and full maturity.” An additional collection, Winter Trees, would appear in 1972, and a collection of prose, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, in 1977. (Gilson, B.)

Many critics had issues when Plath started on her later work, specifically her famous poem “Daddy.”  Some critics contend that Plath's jarring effects and preoccupation with her own problems are “extravagant, and many object to her equation of personal sufferings with such horrors as those experienced by victims of Nazi genocide.”  Others, however, praise the passion and formal structure of her later poems, through which she confronted her tensions and conflicts." (Sylvia Plath) Some critics were outraged, understandably many of them Jewish, and some with strong ties to Holocaust survivors.”(Sylvia Plath) It’s a very touchy subject, and it may well be that we’re too close to the event to turn the Holocaust into a metaphor. But that’s exactly what Sylvia Plath did, audaciously wielding the power of metaphor to the extreme. This is not to say that the poet is free from all responsibility in language. “Quite the contrary, but Plath’s disturbing use of imagery and metaphor is not a mere artistic pose, but rather a sincere attempt to reveal the self – at this point clearly a self in great torment.”(Sylvia Plath)With that occurring her death in February 1963 didn’t arouse too much sympathy.  “At the time not many people knew anything about this rather obscure, expatriate American poet whose publications amounted to little more than a slim, pocket paperback. Her death did not create the international shockwaves that would come from the death seven years later of another American expatriate in London.”(Enotes.) 

The reason Sylvia sticks out like a sore thumb is because, “Her vivid, intense poems explore such topics as personal and feminine identity, individual suffering and oppression, and the inevitability of death.”(Kinsey-Clinton, M.) Being a voice for women, loud and clear, “Plath's desire to bring her own life cycle to full complete fruition in motherhood is also strongly evinced from the time of her earlier work, only growing more securely rooted as her writing progressed along with maturation.”(Gilson, B.) "Today, Sylvia is remembered for her famous quotes and books and a movie has been made in her name.  Not only has she written over two-hundred and thirty poems she has won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Collected Poems. She is still a highly regarded and much studied poet to this day. (Literary works.) Even now there have been children’s books published, “The Bed Book (1976), The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996), Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001), and Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001).”(Kinsey-Clinton, M.  ) But above all, her strongest and most controversial imagery was shaped by the unspeakable atrocities from that recent war, which confronted her as a teenager and which gave new meaning to the word “gas.” “The association of gas with the Nazi death camps was enough for the American penal system to turn away from what had been a traditional form of execution. How ironic that a female American poet would perform this method of execution on herself!”(Gilson, B.) Another shocking and sad discovery was “Ted Hughes became her literary executor after her death. While there has been some speculation about how he handled her papers and her image, he did edit what is considered by many to her greatest work, Ariel.” (Literary works.)After all that hard work, chaos from her marriage, Ted Hughes abandoning her, he is the one to publish and make money of her famous works. 

Although Plath's was expected to play is apparent from her early journals to the poems completed in the last month of her life, that same body of work also makes plain that she had accepted some of that role for herself on her own terms: a common theme throughout the writing is the author's intense desire to be a beloved and loving wife and, perhaps even more strong, her desire to become a mother--as long as she could still speak from within her "deeper self" through her writing.”(Kinsey-Clinton, M.) Other critics agree that, “Plath's poetry poignantly reflects her struggles with despair and mental illness, while her efforts to assert a strong female identity and to balance familial, marital, and career aspirations have established her as a representative voice for feminist concerns.”