Remembering poet Sylvia Plath - Telegraph Plath's parents Although famous for her recitation of Daddy, expressing some of the hatred she felt for her father (who died of undiagnosed diabetes when she was eight), she also wrote an affectionate poem about her mother which is less well known. Disquieting Muses describes her mother Aurelia Plath as a kind of Mary Poppins figure: I woke one day to see you, mother, Floating above me in bluest air On a green balloon bright with a million Flowers and bluebirds that never were. Plath who signed letters to her mother as "Sivvy" wrote that she loved her mother "better than anybody." In ways, Plath tried to emulate her parents; when living in an old farmhouse in north Devon she kept bees as her father had done (see her poem The Swarm for an insight into the dark but honey sweet danger of a hive). Plath's drawings I have a visual imagination. For instance, my inspiration is painting and not music when I go to some other art form. I see these things very clearly. Plath was a talented and keen draughtswoman. Her pen and ink drawings show intimate studies from nature and scenes from everyday life. The untitled sketch of a "Male in Profile" is believed to be her husband Ted Hughes drawn in Paris during their honeymoon. It has been said that she has a similar illustrative line to Hockney using a combination of fine marks and crosshatched shading. Her early notes were adorned with drawings that she hoped to include as illustrations for her articles. One such successful example was a drawing of Spanish fishing boats included in a piece she wrote for the Christian Science Monitor in 1956. Plath's husband When the poet met Ted Hughes at a party she bit him on the cheek drawing blood. In a 1961 interview, she recalled: "I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met. Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on. Hughes, the most recent addition to Westminster Abbey's Poets" corner, was having an affair with German Assia Wevill at the time of Plath's suicide. Wevill killed herself and also their four-year-old daughter Alexandra Tatiana Elise (Shura) in 1969, taking her own life in similar fashion to Plath, by gassing herself. Plath's childhood Plath's first poem was published in the Boston Sunday Herald when she was eight. Her talents as an artist were appreciated winning an award for her paintings from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947. She excelled at school attaining the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to attend Cambridge university but viewed it later as being somewhat of a burden, bringing too much intellectual expectation. Plath's feminism I think I would like to call myself 'the girl who wanted to be God'. Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be - perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. Hailed as a feminist icon, Ellen Moers writes of Plath in her 1976 book Literary Women, "No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement." The poet is known for being associated with domesticity. For Plath, that which she created was always the most important; her poetry and her children. When her son Nick was born, she wrote to her mother of "this great bluish, glistening boy [who] shot out on to the bed in a wave of tidal water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily." Plath's legacy Plath will be remembered for her extraordinary ability in many of the arts, from poetry, to drawing and indeed for how she died. Death was, for the poet, part of her artistic legacy: Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. She won the 1955 Glascock Prize, the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a B.A in English from Cambridge with highest honours. Her collections of poetry include Ariel (1965), Winter Trees (1971) and Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968), her short novel The Bell Jar was published in 1963. She also wrote children's books including The Bed Book (1976) and The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996). Plath was played by Gwenyth Paltrow opposite Daniel Craig, as Ted Hughes, in the film Sylvia (2003).