Sylvia Plath Obituaries

Today is the 46th anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death. While Plath was known in some poetry and literary circles at the time of her death, there were only a few obituaries printed in February 1963. Throughout 1963, however, as her poetry and prose appeared in print, small obituary notices appeared alongside the work.

The following is a list of some of the obituaries and tributes to Plath in the months after her death. If you know of any not listed here, please let me know!

Alvarez, A. "A Poet's Epitaph." The Observer. February 17, 1963: 23.
Alvarez, A. "Sylvia Plath." The Review 9. October 1963: 20-26.
"Contributors." Poetry 102. August 1963: 347.
Hamilton, Ian. “Poetry.” London Magazine New Series 3. July 1963: 54-56.
Hughes, Ted. "Note preceeding ten poems." Encounter 21. October 1963: 45.
Note. The Listener. August 29, 1963: 312.
"'A Poet's Epitaph' Honors the late Sylvia Plath Hughes." The Townsman. March 7, 1963: 3.
Smith Alumnae Quarterly. April 1963: 209.
Starbuck, G. "Spectator Notebook." The Spectator 210. February 22, 1963: 220.
"Sylvia Plath Hughes." The Townsman. February 21, 1963: 4.
"Tragic Death of Young Authoress." Saint Pancras Chronicle. February 22, 1963: 5.

Also in 1963, Critical Quarterly (Spring and Summer), Atlantic Monthly (April), Punch (April 3), The New Statesman (May 3), London Magazine (April and June), Poetry (August), The New Yorker (August 3), The Listener (August 29), and The Observer (February 17, October 6 and November 3), The Review (October), and Encounter (October) printed works by Plath.

Update: For those interested in obituaries that ran on Sylvia Plath, please see my paper "'They Had to Call and Call': The Search for Sylvia Plath" published in Plath Profiles 3 (Summer 2010). At the end of the paper (pages 114-115) I do discuss some obituary notices than ran in the Boston papers in the weeks after her death, and I include a scan of one of them.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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