This October marks the birthday of Sylvia Plath. Plath’s influence on modern poetry cannot be overstated, her work irrevocably changed how we think of poetry today. To celebrate her life and work we’ve made a collection featuring two prized recordings that we’re very grateful to have of Plath reading her own work, ‘The Applicant’ and ‘You’re.’

Despite being a visionary poet in her own right, we’ve also included some other poets who contributed to shaping Plath’s remarkable poetic vision. While Plath has sometimes been, and female poets can be generally be, reduced to their influences, we include these other voices to demonstrate how no poet’s work ever exists in a vacuum, contextualising Plath’s own remarkable work in the context of her diverse sources and inspirations.

Plath published her first poem when she was eight years old, in the Boston Herald’s children’s section. Although influenced by literature in her early years as a young writer, such as the work of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Theodore Roethke and Emily Dickinson, the so-called ‘confessional’ poets had a significant influence on Plath later on, including the work of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. Plath was also deeply influenced by Greek myth, which our inclusion of Robert Graves‘ ‘The White Goddess’ points to, as alluded to in her poem ‘Red.’ Plath was also deeply interested in the occult and tarot, as Julia Gordon-Bramer’s new biography of Plath, ‘The Occult Sylvia Plath: The Hidden Spiritual Life of the Visionary Poet’, shines a light on.

Although scholars often have commented on the fraught biographical details of Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes, few have, as Heather Clark considers in ‘The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes‘, explored their relationship as a literary partnership, overlooking ‘the aesthetic and ideological similarities that provided a foundation for Plath’s and Hughes’s creative marriage – such as their mutual fascination with D. H. Lawrence and motifs of violence and war’.

Plath’s ongoing influence on poetry can still be felt keenly in the work of contemporary poets, even if their styles differ from hers. Her influence on what has been called ‘confessional’ poetry, or ‘the apparently personal’ as Sharon Olds would later redefine it, is evident. Plath’s poetic emphasis on personal experience and her employment of vivid, striking imagery not only continues to inspire poets, but she also greatly changed the landscape of American literature, expanding limited notions of a “confessional” writing style, through an poetic approach replete with literary and mythological allusions that fearlessly examines the self and the status of womanhood and femininity in society.

Whilst often considered a leading ‘confessional poet’, Plath often uses dramatic monologue, as in her poem ‘The Applicant’. In this devastating satire on the conventional marriage, she uses the sales-speak of modern commerce to expose society’s dehumanising expectations of women. The poems on display here and the inclusion of some of Plath’s influences, sources and contemporaries, provide us with the rare opportunity not only to hear Plath in her own words but alongside the voices that helped inform one of the most original voices of the twentieth century.

If you’re interested in learning more about Plath’s work, The Sylvia Plath Collection, containing writings by and about Plath, including poems, journals, articles, and correspondence to and from her, is kept at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.