Sylvia Plath

 Sylvia Plath: Biography

Sylvia Plath is one of the prominent poet in English Literature. She is the confessional and darkest poet. Sylvia Plath is best known for her work Bell Jar, this poet and novelist explores themes of death, self and human nature in works that reveal an uncertain attitude towards the universe.

Life & Career

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932, to the family of Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father, a professor of biology (the study of plant and animal life) at Boston University and authoritative research on bees, and a respected person, died when Sylvia Plath was eight years old.

He was left with feelings of sadness, guilt and anger that haunted him for life and led him to compose most of his poetry. Plath became a socially appropriate child figure. He was also an excellent student who fascinated his teachers at the Winthrop, Massachusetts public school, and earned him awards and praise for his writing skills. He was only eight and a half years old when his first poem was published in the Boston Herald.

Plath lived in Winthrop with his mother and sister, Warren, until 1942. These early years gave him a strong awareness of the beauty and terror of nature and a strong love and fear of the ocean. In 1942 his mother got a job as a teacher, then bought a house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, an area where the educated and respected middle class people also influenced Plath's life and values.

His first story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again", was published in Seventeen magazine in August 1950. In September 1950, Plath entered Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts, on a scholarship. There he once again excelled in his studies academically and socially. Referred to as the “golden girl” by teachers and peers, she planned her writing career in detail. He filled notebooks with stories and poems, formed his words carefully and won many awards.

In August 1952, Plath won a fiction contest held by Mademoiselle, she landed a position as guest editor at the magazine in June 1953. Her experiences in New York, further depressing and later became the basis of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963).

Upon returning home, Plath, tired of her image as an All-American girl or woman, developed a serious mental breakdown, attempted suicide and received treatment for her trauma. By February 1953 he had recovered enough to return to Smith College. She graduated and won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University in England, where she met her future husband, the poet, Ted Hughes (1930-1998). They married in June 1956 in London, England.

After Plath received his bachelor's degree, he returned to America to accept a teaching position at Smith in the 1957-1958 school year. He quit a year after devoting all his time to writing. In a short time he also took a poetry course given by the American poet, Robert Lowell (1917-1977), where he met the American poet, Anne Sexton (1928-1974).

The influence of Sexton and Lowell was important to his development as a poet. Both urged him to write on a very personal subject. Plath and her husband were invited as regular writers at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where they lived and worked for two months. It was here that Plath completed many of the poems he collected in The Colossus (1960), the first volume of his collection of poems. His first child, Frieda, was born in 1960. Then his second child, Nicholas, was born two years later.

The Colossus is lauded for being “well woven” and “contemplating anxiously” about the dangers and horrors that lurk in humanity's place in the universe. But it was criticized for the lack of a 'personal voice'. It was not until “Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices” (1962) – a radio drama considered a landmark by some critics – did Plath begin to break free from his style and write more natural, less narrative poetry. “Three Women”, like most of Plath's poetry, is dramatic in structure and expresses the deeply personal themes that characterize her work.

Expressing the Dark Side of His Life

As a 'growing' poet, Plath is inclined towards writing that is more autobiographical (about his own life) and personal. Most of the Plath's poems in Ariel (1965), considered his best work written during the last few months of his life, are personal accounts of anger, insecurity, fear, extreme loneliness and death.

He had found the 'voice' he had been trying to express for so long. Violent and ruthless in his descriptions of his suicide, death and brutality, Ariel shocked critics, especially some poets who compared his father to members of the Nazis (members of Germany's ruling party, 1933-45, who killed six million Jews during World War II. 1939-45], which was a war fought between Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States against Germany, Italy, and Japan).

Plath could not escape the tragedy that attacked and took over his personal life. By February 1963 his marriage had ended. He is sick and living on the verge of another breakdown while caring for two young children in a small apartment in London, England, during the coldest winter in years. On February 11 he committed suicide. The last thing she did was leave her children by preparing them two cups of milk and a plate of buttered bread.

In poems published after Plath's death in Crossing The Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1971), Plath voiced his long-hidden anger about “the years of separation, smiles and compromises.” A more complete view of Plath's tortured mind is The Unabridged Journal of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 published 2002.

Although Sylvia Plath is often regarded by critics as a poet about death, her final poem, which deals with herself and how she continues to live in a broken, materialistic world (focused on acquiring material wealth), clearly expresses her need for faith in the healing powers of the arts.