At Cambridge, in a party, she met and felt in love with Ted Hughes who was a English poet and later became England’s poet Laurent. She married him on 16 th June, 1956. In1957, Plath moved to America with Hughes after receiving her degree. After a stay at the Yaddo, they went back to England in 1959. The next year, her first child was born, and they bought the house in Devon in 1961. But their marriage fell apart after their second child was born because of the extramarital affair of Hughes. Then the couple lived apart in late 1962, then Plath moved to London with her children. She was driven down and tortured by the hard lives and the betrayal of Hughes, so in the cold winter, on 11 th February, 1963,cooked the breakfast for her children, she ended her life by gas suction, and then she was only thirty-one years old.
 “One might posit that Plath’s poetry evolved through four stages” (Gill 75).The first was the period of her juvenilia, when she studied at Smith College. The early poems mainly explored the dilemmas of female main body and demonstrated a sensitive awareness of the limits and possibilities of figuration. In 1955, Plath graduated from Smith College, and won the Glascock Prize with “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by Real Sea”. The poems written in this period were from the mind of a female student. They displayed the readers the experience of the poet, and the trace of imitation. Before 1956, she wrote about 220poems whose rhyme mostly was formal, the vocabulary was large, and the structure was relatively complicated. The pattern of her poems was prototype, too. The contents and themes mostly showed her thought and happiness. “Plath’s second stage, a period of growth and experiment, lasted from when she married Ted Hughes in 1956 to their permanent settlement in England in 1959” (Gill76). She enjoyed the time when she was in England. In this period, her maiden work “The Colossus and Other Poems” was written，which was considered to be an accomplishment in her early period. “There was little in her work that could be identified as Sylvia Plath voice” (Wagner-Martin 177). During this period, she was imitating other male writers’ works as before and quite affected by Ted Hughes. From 1960 to the end of her marriage in 1962 was the third stage of the poetry of Sylvia Plath. It is “a dynamic period of passion and self-discovery” (Gill 80). Plath became gradually mature and self-confident. 浅析西尔维娅•普拉斯诗歌中的生死观(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_27255.html