Sylvia
Plath
By Ashleigh Reeves
and
Shawna Yetter
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 at the Massachusetts
Memorial Hospital in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood.
Her family consisted of her mother, Aurelia Schober, who studied under
her father, Otto Plath, a professor of German and Biology and her
younger brother, Warren.
In 1936 the family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, a location
mentioned throughout her poetry.
In 1940, a week after Sylvia’s eighth birthday, her father died due to
complications from a case of advanced Diabetes.
That same year Sylvia published her first poem called “Poem,” in the
Boston Herald’s children’s section, “about what I see and hear on hot
summer nights.”
In a 1949, while Sylvia was in middleschool, she co-authored a published
response to an article in The Atlantic
Monthly titled "A Reasonable Life in a
Mad World". The original article stated
that modern man must rely on the
ability to reason in order to further
society. Sylvia’s response argued that,
beyond reason, one needed to
connect with and embrace inner
divinity and spirituality to fully live.
Sylvia was a devoted scholar,
constantly making strait A’s and
keeping a comfortable position at the
head of her class.
Finishing out her high school career,
Sylvia consistently received good
grades and earned recognition and
publication as a writer, artist and
editor.
She won a scholarship to Smith
College in 1950, where she wrote over
four hundred poems and short stories,
many of which were published.
As graduation Grew Nearer there
came heaps of honors and awards,
as well as other prizes and
publication news.
"And Summer Will Not Come Again" was
accepted for publication in Seventeen
magazine, and she Sylvia saw the first
national publication of one of her poems
when “Bitter Strawberries" appeared in
The Christian Science Monitor just after
her graduation in 1950.
In 1952 Sylvia won Mademoiselle's
college fiction contest with her story
"Sunday At The Mintons,” and, in 1953,
continued writing for the magazine as a
“guest editor” in New York City. The
magazine’s August issue featured several
articles by and about Plath, and her poem
”Mad Girl’s Love Song".
Circus In Three Rings" was her first poem
to finally be published in The Atlantic
Monthly.
During the 1954 - 1955 school year,
Sylvia's "Go Get The Goodly Squab" was
published in Harper's and her "Parallax"
earned an honorable mention in
Mademoiselle's "Dylan Thomas Poetry
Contest”.
In 1960, when she was 28, her first book,
The Colossus, was published in England.
Over the years Sylvia developed periodic bouts of depression, insomnia and thoughts of suicide.
An excerpt from her journal reads:
"To annihilate the world by annihilation of one's self is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the
little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against.... I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly
into the womb.”
On August 24, 1953 Sylvia broke into the family lockbox and stole sleeping pills. She left a note declaring she had gone
for a long walk, and instead entered a crawl space under the porch through the cellar and swallowed around forty pills.
Her family found her two days later. Sylvia was admitted to McClean Hospital's mental institution at Belmont where she
worked with a female psychiatrist on her problems. Electroshock and insulin shock therapy was her prescribed treatment.
Sylvia’s depression worsened and consumed her conscience at times, contributing as a cause for some chronic illnesses.
Sylvia graduated summa cum laude in June with a Fulbright scholarship
that sent her to Cambridge to study literature.
In early 1956, while attending a party held to celebrate the launch of a new
Cambridge literary magazine, St. Botolph's Review, she met a poet named Ted
Hughes, a young Faber & Faber poet, describing him as "big, dark hunky boy, the
only one... huge enough for me.”
The two immediately hit it off and on June 16, 1956 were married, settling for a
while in an English country village in Devon.
However, what was at first a mutually loving marriage eventually turned into a twisted and mutually abusive
ongoing.
Sylvia once admitted that one afternoon, as the couple sat on a hill, Ted was overcome by such rage that
he started choking her, and she resigned herself to die. Less than two years after the birth of their first child,
Frieda Rebecca , their marriage fell apart. By their second child, Nicholas Farrar, there was nothing left.
Ted abandoned her for Assia Gutmann Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill. With the
abandonment came an overbearing wave of self-destruction, torment and anguish, affecting her mentally and
showing through in her writing.
Sylvia’s early poetry was largely based on the current styles of ironic and refined verse. As years passed,
along with hardships in her life, her intensity, imagination, and attention to the evolving boundaries of her
introspection began to characterize her poetry. Her literary reputation rests mainly on her carefully
constructed pieces of poetry, particularly the ones that she composed in the months leading up to her
death.
.
The way she consistently handled very painful and hair-raising subjects such as suicide, self-loathing,
dysfunctional relationships and shock treatment shows an astonishing sense of control. The reader is
drawn into that suffering as if they were a direct participant.
Her ceaseless self-scrutiny has given a unique point of view to psychological disorder and fuelled debates
about the psychodynamics of female creativity, and the creativity of poetry itself.
Books
The Colossus (1960)
The Bell Jar (1963)
Crossing the Water (1971)
The Collected Poems (1981)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977)
Ariel (1965)
Awards
Mount Holyoke College Glascock Poetry
Prize, 1955
Bess Hokin Award (Poetry, Chicago), 1957
Cheltenham Festival prize, 1961
Eugene F. Saxon fellowship, 1961
Pulitzer Prize, 1982, for Collected Poems.
On February 11, 1963,
after bringing bread and milk to her
children’s room, Sylvia sealed the
door between them and herself.
She knelt in front of the open oven
and turned the gas on.
At the early age of 30, Sylvia Plath
was dead.
''Dying / is an art, like
everything else. / I do it
exceptionally well.'' (in 'Lady
Lazarus')
“By the time of her death, on 11
February 1963, Sylvia Plath had
written a large bulk of poetry. To my
knowledge, she never scrapped
any of her poetic efforts. With one
or two exceptions, she brought
every piece she worked on to some
final form acceptable to her,
rejected at most the odd verse, or a
false head or a false tail. Her
attitude to her verse was artisanlike: if she couldn’t get a table out of
the material, she was quite happy
to get a chair, or even a toy. The
end product of her was not so much
a successful poem, as something
that had temporarily exhausted her
ingenuity.”
—Ted Hughes.
Ted Hughes’ poem "Last Letter"
Poppies in October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so
astoundingly—
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for by sky
Palely and flamily
igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
--Sylvia Plath
Works Cited
Liukkonen, Petri. Ari Pesonen, and Victoria Lucas. "Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)." Web. 30 Nov. 2011.
<http://kirjasto.sci.fi/splath.htm>.
"Neurotic Poets - Sylvia Plath." Neurotic Poets - Neurotic Poets - The Link Between Creativity And
Madness. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. http://neuroticpoets.com/plath/
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home by Sylvia Plath. ed. Aurelia Plath. New York: 1975.
Plath, Sylvia. Poetic Madness - Depression – Suicide. Bipolar Disorder Symptoms, Diagnosis,
Medications, Treatment - Coping With Bipolar Disorder. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.
http://bipolar.about.com/cs/celebs/a/sylviaplath.htm
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. 1981. ed. Ted Hughes; posthumous Pulitzer Prize. - Sanatuojat suom.
Marja-Leena Mikkola, 1987
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. HarperCollins, 2008 ed. Ted Hughes. Print.
Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 10: Sylvia Plath." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and
Reference Guide. URL:http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/plath.html. 2011.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: a Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Pictures Cited
Sylvia. Ronnie Barrows. 2010. Photograph. Between the Static & the Magic. Web. 11 Nov 2011.
<http://staticblackmagic.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html>.
Stings. 2010. Photograph. The Thinking Tank. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://thethinkingtank.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/sylvia plath-sylvia plath/>.
Sylvia at Work. 2010. Photograph. The Thinking Tank. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://thethinkingtank.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/sylvia plath-sylvia plath/>.
Sylvia Again. 2010. Photograph. The Thinking Tank. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://thethinkingtank.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/sylvia plath-sylvia plath/>.
Sylvia Concentrating. 2010. Photograph. The Thinking Tank. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://thethinkingtank.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/sylvia plath-sylvia plath/>.
Sylvia and Ted. 2010. Photograph. Whitby Pop Watch. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://whitbypopwatch.blogspot.com/2010/08/whitsun-sylvia-plath.html>.
The Hughes'. 2010. Photograph. Poetry & Poets in Rags. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://poetryandpoetsinrags.blogspot.com/2010/10/news-at-eleven-in-tomorrows-new.html>.
Happy Sylvia. 2011. Photograph. A Good Day to Die. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://agooddaytodie.tumblr.com/post/3234736248/sylvia-plath-american-confessional-poet-and>.
The Bell Jar . ND. Photograph. Polyvore. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://www.polyvore.com/bell_jar_sylvia_plath_books/thing?id=18137162>.
Eye Rhymes. 2011. Photograph. P.H. Davies. Web. 21 Nov 2011. <http://phdavies.co.uk/2011/06/29/connors-andbayley-eye-rhymes-sylvia-plaths-art-of-the-visual-review/>.
Sylvia and Kids. ND. Photograph. Literature Forum & Presentation Pages. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://litpresentations.pbworks.com/w/page/18059470/Discussion Group - Confessional Poetry - Spring
2010>.
Ted Hughes Estate. Last Letter. 2010. Photograph. MSNBC. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/39564771/ns/today-entertainment/t/husbands-poem-sylvia-plaths-suicidepublished/
Joan Welz. Sylvia III. ND. Photograph. American Poems. Web. 21 Nov 2011.
<http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath>.