Bold Type's Poetry Editor Ernest Hilbert writes that "literary historians are fond of abundantly demiurgical years in a poet's career, particularly the last years before an untimely death, such as those of John Keats (who died at 25) and Wilfred Owen (who died at 27). Plath composed an astounding twenty-six seminal poems in the single month after her separation from Hughes. In many ways she was the best of the confessional poets, balancing her classical erudition with an untamably passionate sensibility, and she, along with Sexton, inaugurated an era of American poetry that is still with us. Just as she once fell under the sway of Hughes and Stevens, young poets today, both men and women, are easily pulled under by the dark currents of her Ariel poems, and those waters are deeper than they at first appear."

Listen to Plath read 'Lady Lazarus' and read an essay on the Sylvia Plath Voice of the Poet recordings.