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Sylvia Plath was a brilliant poet and writer. She wrote several books of poems but did not become famous until after her death. The events that occurred in her life deeply affected what and who she wrote about. Her father s death, going into deep depression while in college and trying to kill herself, and her husband Ted Hughes were some of the events that influenced her writing. Even though she was a smart and likeable person she decided to end her life at the age of thirty. Plath could not handle the pressure of success.
This is the story of her life and the tragic events that influenced her to write her works. Plath was born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Her parents were Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father was from the German town of Grow and immigrated to the United States at the age if fifteen.
He taught applied biology at Boston University, where he met Aurelia Plath, whom he married in January, 1932. He was known as a bee expert, but in 1935 his health began to decline. When in August, 1940, he stubbed his toe and suffered immediate complications, he was diagnosed as suffering from diabetes mellitus. (Robinson, 404) His toe grew worse, and his leg was amputated. He soon died from pulmonary embolus. Plath s mother had also been a teacher of English and German. Aurelia instilled Plath with an achievement ethic, which drove her precocious talent for writing and drawing.
Otto s death, his dramatic circumstances, and the insuring move inward to Wellesley affected Plath profoundly. Writing poetry became a new way of being happy. The sea, her father, and childhood became a haunting loss. (Mossburg, 395) Plath published her first poem at age eight. She was sensitive, intelligent, and compelled toward perfection at everything she attempted. On the surface she was a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A s, and winning the best prizes. By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications. , and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.
In her high school years she always felt divided In September 1950, Plath entered Smith College. She received financial aid from Nelson scholarship, the Smith Club or Wellesley, and the Olive Higgins Pretty fund. Plath continued to thrive both socially and academically she continued, however, to have trouble blending the two. Plath continued to write poems and stories and send them to several publishers like Merdemoiselle, Seventeen, and Harper magazines. Her mother became her part-time agent and typist. In the summer of 1953, Plath was awarded the guest editorship for Mademoiselle.
She was assigned to be managing editor. The social activities planned for her group and New York itself, offered Plath a new, exciting experience, however, at the end of june, she left for Boston exhausted and depressed (Gilson, 3). Plath s experience in New York is evident in her autobiography novel, The Bell Jar. When she returned home, she learned that she was reflected from a fiction writing class at Harvard summer school.
Her depression a sense of failure intensified. Finally, in August, Sylvia left a note saying that she went for a walk, when really she crawled under her house and swallowed a large amount of sleeping pills. Three days later she was discovered and rushed to the hospital. Unable to deal with the pressure to succeed, she attempted suicide (Gilson, 3). She recovered in a private hospital were she received electroshock treatments and psychotherapy. She returned to Smith College for her senior year in February 1954.
In her senior year she submitted her English honor thesis, The Magic Mirror. A study of the Double in two of Dostoevsky s Novel, and was graduated summa cum laude in June. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at Newnhame College, the University of Cambridge, and sailed across the Atlantic in September. She joined the University s Dramatic Society, modeled and wrote for the Cambridge Newspaper Varsity, vacationed in France, and maintained an active social life.
In March 1956, Plath met the British poet Ted Hughes. The following June, they were married. During that summer they traveled to Spain. She was awarded a second year on her Fulbright and Hughes began to teach at a secondary school.
Plath became Hughes s typist and agent, devoting much of her own time and energy for the one she loved. She was still able to find time for her own work. She completed her year of study and in 1957, submitted her manuscript of poetry, Two Lovers and a Beach Comber, for her degree at Newnham college. In June 1946, she and Hughes sailed for the United States, where she would be an instructor in freshman English at Smith College.
She enjoyed her teaching and was regarded as an excellent instructor, but the strain of grading essays led her to leaved the academic world after one year. Plath and Hughes stayed in Boston for the following year, both trying to earn a living by writing and part-time work. She also attended Robert Lowell s poetry class at Boston University. While there, she met a few young poets, including Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. In the summer of 1949, one year after being in Boston, the Hughes planned to return to England. Ted Hughes had been awarded a Guggenheim grant to write for the next year and Ted wished for a child.
In December 1959, Plath and Hughes settled in London. They spent the winter writing, reading and developing new friendships. Early in 1960, Plath signed a contract with William Heinemann for the first poetry volume, The Colossus and Other Poems and Hughes s second volume was published. On April 1, 1960, Frieda Rebecca Hughes was born. Although her first child was wonderful, Plath found the following year increasingly difficult. Her new duties left little time for writing.
In February 1961, Plath suffered a miscarriage and in March she underwent an appendectomy. That summer, Plath and Hughes purchased a house in Croton, Devon and went to France for a brief vacation. In August they moved into their house in Devon and in November Plath was given a grant to enable her to work on The Bell Jar. She signed a long-term contract for her poems with the New Yorker in March and in May Alfred A. Knopf planned to publish The Colossus in America. Plath became pregnant again and she and her husband decided to move.
In September 1961, they moved into a thatch-rooted manor house in Devon, an hours drive from the sea. On January 17, 1962, Plath gave birth to her second child, Nicholas. Within a period of ten days in April she composed six poems, a sign of her growing desire to fit into the village life of Croton and of her returning poetic voice. In June, Plath s mother arrived from America and remained until August. In July, Plath learned of Hughes s affair with Asia Gutman. On September 11, Plath and Hughes journeyed to Ireland and then Hughes immediately left Plath and went to London with Gutman.
Plath returned alone to Devon, where, with her children, she attempted to rebuild her life. She wrote twenty-three poems in October and ten in November. She decided that she could face another winter in Devon, so she found a hut in London and moved therewith her children in the middle of December. The winter proved to be one of the worst on record and life in the hut became intolerable.
The children were ill, the weather was cold, there was little heat, the pipes had frozen and Plath was suffering extreme depression over her seperation from Hughes. On January 14, 1963 The Bell Jar was published to only luke warm reviews. Her mood worsened and on February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide in the kitchen of her flat. Plath went through a lot of dramatic events in her life that has caused her to write about these events in poems and in the books she wrote.
These events stretched from early childhood to the end of her short life. Plath s poetry is largely confessional, she writes about her problems in school, with marriage, and her father s death. She also uses her poetry as a journal, recording every day things and making it into a poem. Such as Medallion, in which she discovers a dead snake. The lines of the poem used prose, the piece would have very much looked like a diary entry. Plath was known for her confessional poetry and there were others as well: Robert Hughes in the Those Winter Sundays, and William Stanford in Traveling Through the Dark.
Types of poems like these are still written now. Her earlier works are from 1955 and 1959. Plath wrote some of the first, Colossus poems when she was twenty-three and therefore, ther early poetry displays an amateur, experimental quality. Her early poetry is collected in the Colossus. In these works the doom, death, and humor, and emotional conflicts, are some of the themes. Nearly all of Plath s early poems are death related.
She also wrote confessional poetry like one called Daddy. In that poem she expresses how she was mad at her father for dying while she was still a young girl. Her most famous work The Bell Jar was a huge poem because she described everything in great detail that painted a vivid picture for the reader. The Bell Jar talks about a period of confusion, disintegration and renewal of life that the narrator goes through, who Plath in real life. The autobiographical novel gets its material from Plath s time as a guest editor in 1953. Through her subagent breakdown and attempted suicide, to the time she recovered and went back to school. (Ames, 289) Another work that dealt with an event in her life was the Jailer, written after the separation from Hughes.
In the poem she describes Hughes as the Jailer that drugged her and also raped her. She compares herself to being a black woman being burned by her master with his cigarettes. Plath ands the poem revealing her worst fear, that he is doing to a new victim, the same things he did to her. This was written four months before her death, which shows Plath at her strongest and weakest points.
In conclusion, Sylvia Plath was a model daughter, wife and mother but underneath she was very depressed and could not deal with the pressure to succeed. Plath s drew all of her material directly from her life. It was her father s death, her attempted suicide, and her husband leaving her alone to raise her children because of another woman that drew the depressive energy to write her greatest works. Plath struggled to deal with these events, and were about them so others could see and feel what happened to her.
I think Sylvia Plath was a great writer of poems and books. Although seeming weak to some, at certain points in Plath s life she proved to be the strongest of people, through being brave enough to expose her innermost pain to the world. Works Cited 1. Robinson, Tomas.
Great American Writers. Jar Publishing Company, page 404 2. Mossburg, Barbara. Great American Women Writers. Salem Press Inc. , page 295. 3. Gilson, Bill.
The Walking Man Presents: Silvia Plath. web resold / plath /bio. htm page 3. 4. Gilson, Bill. The Walking Man Presents: Silvia Plath.
web resold / plath /bio. htm page 3. 5. Ames, Lois. Sylvia Plath: A Biographical Note. Harper &# 038; Row Publishers Inc. , page 287.
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