Sylvia Plath

File:Plath Self-portrait.jpg

A self-portrait circa 1951.

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Most famous as a poet, Plath is also known for The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel detailing her struggle with clinical depression. Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell are given credit for starting the genre of confessional poetry. Since her suicide, Sylvia Plath has risen to iconic status and is considered to be one of the best poets of her generation.

Life

Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, a section of Boston, Massachusetts. Born to a German father and an ethnic German Austrian-American mother, Plath showed early promise, publishing her first poem at the age of 8. She attended Wellesley High School. Her father, Otto, a college professor and noted authority on the subject of bees, died of an embolism following surgery (complications from undiagnosed diabetes) on November 5, 1940. It is thought that Plath never fully recovered from the loss of her father. She continued to try to publish poems, and in August of 1950, her first short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared in Seventeen Magazine. Sylvia suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life. She had entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but in her junior year, at age 20, she made the first of her suicide attempts. She later depicted her breakdown through the summer and winter of 1953 in the semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. She was committed to a mental institution (McLean Hospital), and seemed to make an acceptable recovery, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955, the same year she won the prestigious Glascock Prize competition for her poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea."

Plath earned a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where she continued writing poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge she met English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956 with Plath's mother in attendance. Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the United States. Plath taught at Smith. They then moved to Boston where Plath sat in on seminars with Robert Lowell. This course was to have a profound influence on her work. Also attending the seminars was Anne Sexton. At this time Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and remained a lifelong friend. On discovering that Plath was pregnant, they moved back to the United Kingdom.

She and Hughes lived in London for a while and then settled in Court Green, North Tawton, a small market town in Mid Devonshire. She published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, in England in 1960. In February 1961 she suffered a miscarriage. A number of poems refer to this event. The marriage met with difficulties and they were separated less than two years after the birth of their first child. Their separation was mainly due to her mental illness, and the affair that Hughes had with a fellow poet's wife, Assia Wevill.

Plath returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas. She rented a flat in Fitzroy Street, Primrose Hill, in a house where W. B. Yeats once lived; Plath was extremely pleased with this and considered it a good omen. The winter of 1962/1963 was very harsh and perhaps the second worst of the century. On February 11, 1963, Plath gassed herself in her kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty. The new nanny arrived but couldn't raise Plath's neighbour in the flat below (he was under the effect of the gas). The children were found in good health, if chilled from the cold air of the room (Plath had left the windows open to keep the rooms ventilated; also placing dishtowels in the door cracks to keep her children from inhaling the gas).

Plath is buried in the churchyard at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Rumours of Sylvia's poverty in the last year of her life have been disputed by later books, particularly Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame. The neutrality of this biography is disputed, and it remains difficult to obtain an objective account of the relationship between Plath and Hughes.

Works

Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. This is controversial, as it is uncertain whether or not Plath had begun divorce proceedings before her death: if she had, Hughes' inheritance of the Plath estate would have been disputed. In letters to Aurelia Plath and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she was applying for a divorce. However, Hughes has said in a letter to The Guardian that Plath did not seriously consider divorce, and claims they were talking about a future together right up until her death.

He is understood to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their time together. (His papers, archived at Columbia University, may yet prove differently.) In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (for The Collected Poems).

Many critics, often feminist, accused Hughes of attempting to control the publications for his own ends, although he denied this. Examples usually cited are his censoring of parts of her Journals, and his editing of Ariel. This editing involved removing several poems, and rearranging the order in which the works appeared. Some critics have argued this prevented what was intended to be a more uplifting beginning and ending of Ariel, and that the poems removed were the ones most readily identified as being about Hughes. He also cut a deal with Plath's mother Aurelia when she tried to block publication of her daughter's more controversial works in the United States. In his last collection, Birthday Letters, Hughes broke his silence about Plath. The cover artwork was done by Frieda. While critics initially responded favorably to Plath's first book, The Colossus, it has also been described as conventional and lacking the drama of her later works. The extent of Hughes' influence has been a topic of great debate. Plath's poems are in her own voice and the similarities between the two poets' works are slight.

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more confessional area of poetry. It is likely the teachings of Lowell played a part in this shift. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its frank descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as Daddy. Plath has also been heavily criticised for her controversial allusions to The Holocaust, and is known for her shocking use of metaphor. Plath's work has been associated with Anne Sexton. W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets. Despite criticism and biographies published after her death, the debate about Plath's work resembles a struggle between readers who side with her and readers who side with Hughes. An indication of the level of bitterness that some people have directed at Hughes can be seen in the history of people chiseling the word Hughes off her gravestone. Her headstone has subsequently been rendered more 'tamper proof.'

Bibliography

Poetry

• The Colossus (1960)
• Ariel (1965)
• Crossing the Water (1971)
• Winter Trees (1972)
• The Collected Poems (1981)

Prose

• The Bell Jar (1963) under the pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas'
• Letters Home (1975) to and edited by her mother
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977) (the UK edition contains two stories the US edition does not)
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
• The Magic Mirror (1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

Children's

• The Bed Book (1976)
• The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
• Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
• Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)
• A number of 'limited edition' works were published by specialist publishers, often with very small print runs.

Biography

• Sylvia Plath (2004, Chelsea House, Great Writers Series) by Peter K. Steinberg | ISBN 0791078434

Other references

• The 2003 film, Sylvia, tells the story of the troubled relationship of the poet couple.
• Hayman, Ronald [1991] The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath London, Melbourne, Auckland Heinemann
• Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, by Erica Wagner.
• Linda Wagner-Martin "Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life". London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
• "Sylvia Plath" by Ryan Adams from the record "Gold" 2001
• "Crackle & Drag" by Paul Westerberg from the 2003 album "Come Feel Me Tremble"

Hello Mike and Nancy! lol-Mike

External links

• www.sylviaplath.info
• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• Biography
• Sylvia Plath on Poets.org Biography, poems, related essays and links from the Academy of American Poets
• Sylvia Plath Forum
• Sylvia Plath at Neurotic Poets