Born in October of 1932, Sylvia Plath was a prolific writer who wrote in a wide variety of genres. Though best known as a poet, she was also a novelist, essayist and short story writer. However, her semi-autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar," published in 1963 is generally considered her most famous work.

Another modern Massachusetts-born poet that utilized the confessionalist style, Sylvia Plath published her very first poem at the age of eight. The daughter of middle class parents, the precocious Plath entered Smith College in 1950 with an extensive list of published material, only to author more than 400 poems while at the school.

During her years writing poetry, Plath, along with Anne Sexton, advanced the genre dubbed confessional poetry. That form was initially credited to Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass, and it appears in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, another Massachusetts native.

Seemingly compelled to perfection, Plath suffered from severe depression throughout her life. It is speculated that she suffered from either bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. During the summer of her junior year while still a student at Smith, Plath attempted to take her own life by swallowing an excess amount of sleeping pills. That experience forms the basis of her novel, "The Bell Jar."

Briefly, Plath seemed to recover from her mental health woes. After electroschock- and psycho-therapy she returned to literary efforts. She graduated from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study in England. In 1960, after her marriage to poet Ted Hughes, she published her first book of poems, "The Colossus."

However, barely two years after the birth of their first child, Plath and Hughes marriage fell apart. Living alone with two children, little money and a life of hardship, the mental health issues returned. On February 11, 1963, barely 30 years-of-age, Sylvia Plath did in fact take her own life.

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.
And now you try Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.