(With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which wa...)
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death.
(The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood:...)
The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under - maybe for the last time.
(Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it. Whe...)
Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it. When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel.
(Crossing the Water is a 1971 posthumous collection of poe...)
Crossing the Water is a 1971 posthumous collection of poetry by Sylvia Plath that was prepared for publication by Ted Hughes. These poems were written at the same time as those that appear in Ariel.
(The poems in Winter Trees were written in the last nine m...)
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. They reveal the poet at the height of her creative powers, exhibiting the startling imagery and dramatic play for which she became known.
(Sylvia Plath's correspondence, addressed chiefly to her m...)
Sylvia Plath's correspondence, addressed chiefly to her mother, from her time at Smith College in the early 1950s up to her suicide in London in February 1963. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, these letters also hint at her potential for deep despair.
(The book describes various beds that are much more intere...)
The book describes various beds that are much more interesting than beds for sleeping, such as a jet-propelled bed, snack bed, pocket-size bed, and bounceable bed.
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts
(Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brillian...)
Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imagination. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.
(Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By t...)
Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By the time she was at Smith College when this book begins, she had settled into a nearly daily routine with her journal, which was also a sourcebook for her writing.
(A timeless collection of stories for younger children. In...)
A timeless collection of stories for younger children. In the eponymous The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit, little Max Nix is on a quest to find the perfect suit he can go ice-fishing, cow-milking, and town-walking in. There's magic afoot in Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen and children will love to find their perfect Nighty-night little / Turn-out-the-light little Bed! in The Bed Book.
(Three classic children's stories from Sylvia Plath are co...)
Three classic children's stories from Sylvia Plath are collected together in one volume for the first time, they are Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen, The Bed Book, and The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit.
(A major literary event: the first volume in the definitiv...)
A major literary event: the first volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Sylvia Plath - most never before seen. One of the most beloved poets of the modern age, Sylvia Plath continues to inspire and fascinate the literary world.
(The second volume in the definitive, complete collection ...)
The second volume in the definitive, complete collection of the letters of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Sylvia Plath, from the early years of her marriage to Ted Hughes to the final days leading to her suicide in 1963, many never before seen.
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and artist. Plath has been hailed as one of the most renowned and influential poets of the twentieth century. Her Selected Poems, published by Ted Hughes in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Background
Ethnicity:
Sylvia Plath's mother was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father was from Grabow, Germany.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, the United States. Sylvia's father, Otto Plath, emigrated to the United States from Germany as a teenager, and he grew up to become a professor of entomology at Boston University. Her mother, Aurelia Frances Plath (née Schober), was a student of Otto Plath at the Boston University. It is believed that she rewrote her husband’s technical text, making Bumblebees and Their Ways suitable for general readers.
Sylvia was the eldest of her parents’ two children. An autocrat at home, Otto insisted his wife give up teaching to raise their two children. In 1936, the family left Boston for Winthrop. Here on November 5, 1940, just a few weeks after Sylvia’s eighth birthday, Otto Plath died from complications arising out of diabetes. Sylvia found the death a kind of betrayal by her father.
Education
Sylvia's interest in writing emerged at an early age, and she started out by keeping a journal. Shocked by her father’s death, Sylvia stopped believing in God. In order to cope with her grief, she found solace in writing. In 1942, the family shifted to Wellesley, Massachusetts. Here Aurelia began teaching at Boston University while Sylvia was admitted to Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in the fifth grade.
Plath was more than a gifted student. Although she repeated the fifth grade so that she would be at the same age as her peers, she had a superb intellect. By the age of 12, she was certifiably brilliant, reporting an IQ of 160. This is the same IQ score as Einstein. Considering genius begins to bloom around 140, this was not just impressive for a 12-year-old, but almost unheard of.
Her IQ score was one of the earliest indicators that Plath was destined for great success, but not the only one. She also published her first poem in 1941 at a mere eight years old, in the Boston Herald’s children section. At this time, she became increasingly artistically and literary leaning.
After distinguishing herself at high school, from which she graduated in 1950, Plath entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on a prestigious Fullbright scholarship. Sylvia Plath’s college experience was a bit more tumultuous than most. When she first began to attend school in 1950, her experience didn’t seem far off from normal.
Like many students, Plath ended up changing her major (she transitioned from studio art to creative writing) and she dealt with common anxieties about classes, her relationships, and the future (some of which are detailed in her journals). However, while many of her classmates seemed to find their place in the university, Plath began to struggle with devastating depression and anxiety.
In 1953, she resolved to take her own life, consuming her mother’s pills and crawling under her house. Fortunately, she survived, yet it took three days for the search party to find her. She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. Plath returned to Smith and finished her degree in 1955. While she was a student, Plath also spent time in New York City during the summer of 1953 working for Mademoiselle magazine as a guest editor.
After graduation, she went to England to study at Newnham College under Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship. While there, Plath continued writing poems, publishing them in the student newspaper Varsity. In 1956, she married Ted Hughes, then a budding English poet; but kept it a secret until the end of her course.
After her time as a college student wrapped up, Plath accepted a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College, in 1957. As Plath’s status at Smith changed, so too did her view of it: Plath did not find the teachers she once admired to be quite the same as co-workers. The job also left little time for her poetry. She told no one about it except her journal; and by November of that year, she left the world of academia to focus on writing.
In the middle of 1958, Sylvia and her husband moved to Boston. There she began working as a part-time receptionist at the same psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital where she had been treated after her suicide attempt. Around this time, her poems Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor and Nocturne were accepted by the prestigious and well-paying magazine, The New Yorker. While this elated her, she found it difficult to write and this pushed her to depression once more.
From early 1959, Plath decided to write in a more inward style, trying to portray her own thoughts. Sometime now, she also enrolled in the writing class conducted by Robert Lowell. Eventually, she began to have her works printed in Harper's, The Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement. In May 1959, Sylvia's book of poems, The Bull of Bendylaw, was chosen as the alternate to the winner of the Yale Younger Poets contest. Plath was furious, for she thought herself a better poet than the winner. She would have to work harder.
In June 1959, Sylvia Plath and her husband left for a trip across America and Canada, visiting several places, ultimately settling at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York State, in September. But Plath was pregnant with their first child at that time and so they left for England in December.
Before departing, they spent the fall at Yaddo, an artists' and writers' colony in upstate New York. Here Sylvia "grew as a poet" and found a "voice" for her writing that was "witty, wry, American, brazen, arrogant," a contrast to what Plath called "drawing room" speech. Her new-found voice is evident in her collection The Colossus and Other Poems, which would appear in England in fall 1960.
Colloquial language and subjects based on Plath's own experiences make the collection one of her best and most personal. While on a cross-country trip before sailing for England, Sylvia became pregnant. Obviously, motherhood would entail responsibilities that would take precedence overwriting. But, as usual, Plath had high expectations that would be dashed by the banal realities of everyday living.
Despite suffering from intense depression, Plath still managed to finish her first - and only - novel while struggling as a single mother in her freezing London flat. She was helped by a fellowship from the publisher Harper & Row. The $2,080 she received from them allowed her to write The Bell Jar. When she submitted it to them, however, it was dismissed. One editor even called it "disappointing, juvenile and overwrought." After much effort, Plath finally succeeded in having The Bell Jar published in the United Kingdom in January 1963.
Soon after that, she began working on another novel, Double Exposure, but her last work never saw the light of the day and its manuscript went missing. After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Plath fell into a deep depression. She also created the poems that would make up the collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Plath committed suicide.
In the early morning of February 11, 1963, Plath put some bread and milk in the children's room and then sealed their door off with tape. She then locked herself in the kitchen and placed her head in the oven with the gas turned on, thus committing suicide. Her body was discovered later that day. Her Selected Poems, published by Ted Hughes in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Today, Sylvia Plath is remembered as one of America’s great writers. Above all, she is seen as a pioneer of confessional poetry. She is also seen by many as a feminist icon. Sylvia Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Sylvia Plath.
(Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary as a young child. By t...)
1982
painting
painting
A War to End Wars
1946
Triple-Face Portrait
Twas the Night Before Monday
Religion
Describing herself as "pagan-Unitarian at best," Plath disbelieved in God. She found such belief attractive, but she refused to share it. For Plath, the individual is responsible for creating her own life in the world, the only life she will have. Although open to the possible reality of occult phenomena, Plath's writing about the occult is also, finally, skeptical.
Plath's ultimate concern is a kind of feminist materialism. For her, traditional religions and philosophies describe men's experience and are therefore useless to women. Theological ideas and images, whether Christian or occult, are true only to the extent that they represent material human experiences, especially those of love and suffering. Women's material lives, especially the experiences of love, home, and family, are more valuable in Plath's work than any theological or transcendental ideas devised by men.
Politics
Plath was vehement in her hatred of war and publicly came out against the Korean War. In a 1950 letter to her German penpal, she called the dropping of the atomic bomb "a sin."
Views
Plath never considered herself a feminist, yet her prose and poetry deal with issues which became relevant to the second wave of feminism. In her poems, she criticized the predicament of women in the 1950s. Plath’s confessional poems reflect themes such as the objectification and dehumanization of women, their oppression, and a conflict between work and family life.
Quotations:
"I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers. I think writers and artists are the most narcissistic people."
I talk to God but the sky is empty."
"I desire the things which will destroy me in the end."
Personality
Plath received electroshock therapy as a treatment for her depression and was hospitalized several times over the course of her life. She received her first electroshock treatment after her first suicide attempt at the age of 20.
Interests
Painting
Writers
J.R.R. Tolkien, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Theodore Roethke, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton
Music & Bands
Marilyn Monroe
Connections
Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England. She was there on a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship. The couple married on June 16, 1956, and honeymooned in Benidorm, Spain. The couple had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. While Frieda grew up to be a poet and a painter, Nicholas became an expert in stream salmonid ecology.
Father:
Otto Plath
Otto was a huge influence on Sylvia's work - one of her most famous poems is entitled Daddy, and it and others suggest she fell into the marry-your-father type of trope as well.
Otto died unexpectedly of complications from late-diagnosed diabetes when Sylvia was 8, and she would grapple with that loss for the rest of her life.
Mother:
Aurelia Schober Plath
Aurelia encouraged the young Sylvia to be creative and use her imagination to describe the world around her. Aurelia also did her best to provide Sylvia and her brother with some stability, allowing them both to attend Bradford Senior High Scholl in Wellesley and obtain a solid education.
Spouse:
Ted Hughes
In 1956, Plath met Ted Hughes, the man she would marry after four months of dating, while at Cambridge. Their relationship went from friendly to passionate in minutes. They wed on Bloomsday (June 16th, 1956) which was meant to celebrate James Joyce’s career, because they were both major literary works.
While their careers took their own paths, they edited and inspired one another’s writings. Ted Hughes went on to become the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, while Plath published poetry and several major works just before her passing, gaining much recognition for her talents after her death.
Unfortunately, their relationship wasn’t healthy. Plath wrote to her family that she felt that she had met her equal in life. However, she also testified that Hughes could become physically abusive and that he cheated on her frequently with another woman.
Five months before Plath died, she and Hughes separated a final time, though they never got divorced before her passing. He inherited her work, and is responsible for the publication of her gripping poetry collection Ariel, although he did some controversial editing of his own.
Son:
Nicholas Hughes
Plath’s son Nicholas’s life was marred with tragedy. He lost his mother to suicide as an infant, and 6 years later, his half-sister died when her mother committed suicide and gassed them both. Like his mother, Nicholas suffered from depression and in 2009, at the age of 47, he hanged himself at his home in Alaska.
Daughter:
Frieda Hughes
Brother:
Warner Plath
Friend:
Olivia Higgins Prouty
Olivia Higgins Prouty was a romance novelist and poet who funded a scholarship at her alma mater, Smith College, for promising young writers. Plath was the lucky recipient of that scholarship, and she later became friends with her patron. Prouty gave Plath money for her medical expenses while she was recovering from her first suicide attempt in 1953 and was the inspiration for the character Philomena Guinea in Path’s novel The Bell Jar.
References
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
The highly anticipated new biography of Sylvia Plath focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
2020
The Last Days of Sylvia Plath
In her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes.
