Ariel was published in 1965, two years after Sylvia Plath's suicide at the age of 30. It dramatises her history of mental illness, her passionate and complex feelings for the dominant men in her life and her overwhelming ambition to become a great poet. The collection made her name overnight and cemented her status as the most iconic female poet of the late twentieth century. In 1982, with the appearance of her Collected Poems, Plath became the first poet to be awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.