Sylvia Plath
(1932-1963)
Sylvia Plath was the precocious child of
well-educated Boston parents, Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath. Otto, who taught
German and zoology at Boston University, died when Sylvia was eight of
complications following the amputation of his leg. An authority on bees, he had
been ill the previous four years from untreated diabetes mellitus. Finances
were slim so Sylvia’s mother returned to teaching, and to help care for the
children, her maternal grandparents moved into the Plath home, where they
remained until their deaths. In order to take a position at Boston University
herself, Aurelia moved the family to Wellesley.
Plath’s childhood and adolescence
were a series of high academic achievements. She published poetry, fiction, and
journalism in a number of places even before attending Smith College on a
partial scholarship. An English major at Smith, she continued her consistent
prize winning, but she was also very much a woman of the 1950s, plagued with
thoughts that she had to marry and have children, or else she would never be a
“complete” female. Some of her conflicts over direction (career vs. marriage,
sexual experience vs. chastity) combined with a strain of depression in her
paternal line to cause a breakdown in the summer of 1953, shortly after she had
served as a Mademoiselle College Board editor. The outpatient electroconvulsive
shock treatments she received then probably led to her subsequent suicide
attempt in August of 1953, and she spent the next four months under psychiatric
care before returning to Smith. In June, 1955, she graduated summa cum laude
and got an M.A. on a Fulbright Fellowship at Cambridge, England.
On
June 16, 1956, she married Ted Hughes, eventually to become Poet Laureate of
England. In 1957 they returned to the States where Plath taught freshman
English at Smith. She and Hughes then lived for another year in Boston,
establishing themselves as professional writers; late in 1959 they returned to
England. In the next three years, Plath bore two children, published The
Colossus and Other Poems, established a home in Devon, separated from Hughes,
and was living with her children in a flat in Yeats’s house in London when she
committed suicide, just a few weeks after The Bell Jar had been published. In
1965 Ariel, the collection of some of her last poems, appeared.
Plath’s
poems show a steadily developing sense of her own voice, speaking of subjects
that—before the 1960s—were seldom considered appropriate for poetry: anger,
macabre humor, defiance, contrasted with a rarer joy and a poignant
understanding of women’s various roles. “Three Women,” which is set in a
maternity ward, The Bell Jar, and many of her late 1962 poems were unlike any
of the expert literature she had so carefully imitated—until the last years of
her life. Her breaking out of the conventional patterns set an example that
shaped a great deal of poetry for the next forty years—reliance on metaphor,
quick shifts from image to image, a frantic yet always controlled pace that
mirrored the tensions of her single-parent life during 1962. In contrast to
late poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Plath’s final poems were icily
mystic, solemn, and resigned. The full range of her work is evident in the 1981
Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982.
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