The poems in Winter Trees were written in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath's life, and form part of the group from which the Ariel poems were chosen.
Sylvia Plath (1932-63) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime,
The Colossus (1960), and a novel,
The Bell Jar (1963). Plath's volume
Ariel (1965) secured her reputation and her
Collected Poems (1981), which contains poetry written from 1956 until her death, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.