Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

A black-and-white photo of a woman with shoulder-length hair. She is seated facing the camera, wearing a sweater, with bookshelves behind her.

Plath in 1957
Born (1932-10-27)October 27, 1932
Boston, Massachusetts, US
Died February 11, 1963(1963-02-11) (aged 30)
London, UK
Resting place Heptonstall Church, West Yorkshire, England, UK
Pen name Victoria Lucas
Occupation Poet, novelist, short story writer
Language English
Nationality American
Alma mater Smith College

Newnham College, Cambridge,
University of Cambridge
Period 1960–1963
Genre Poetry, fiction, short story
Literary movement Confessional poetry
Notable works The Bell Jar and Ariel
Notable awards Fulbright scholarship
Glascock Prize
1955

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
1982 The Collected Poems
(posthumously)
Spouse Ted Hughes (1956–1963, her death)
Children Frieda Hughes
Nicholas Hughes
Signature
Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (/plæθ/; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956; they lived together in the United States and then the United Kingdom, and had two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life. She died by suicide in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel. In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.

Life and career

Early life

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood.[1] Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was a second-generation American of Austrian descent, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow, Germany.[2] Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Shorter University, who authored a book about bumblebees.[3]

On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren was born,[1] and in 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts.[4] Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of the town called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry. While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section.[5] Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers.[6] At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal.[6] In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947.[7]

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday,[3] of complications following the amputation of a foot due to untreated diabetes. He had become ill shortly after a close friend died of lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his friend's symptoms and his own, Otto became convinced that he, too, had lung cancer and did not seek treatment until his diabetes had progressed too far. Raised as a Unitarian Christian, Plath experienced a loss of faith after her father's death and remained ambivalent about religion throughout her life.[8] Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery, Massachusetts. A visit to her father's grave later prompted Plath to write the poem Electra on Azalea Path. After Otto's death, Aurelia moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942.[3] In one of her last prose pieces, Plath commented that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth".[1][9] Plath attended Bradford Senior High School (now Wellesley High School) in Wellesley, graduating in 1950.[1] Just after graduating from high school, she published her first national publication in the Christian Science Monitor.[6]

College years

Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts

In 1950, Plath attended Smith College and excelled academically. She wrote to her mother, "The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon".[10] She edited The Smith Review and during the summer after her third year of college was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City.[1] The experience was not what she had hoped it would be, and it began a downward spiral. She was furious at not being at a meeting the editor had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas—a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself." She hung around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs to see if she had enough courage to commit suicide.[11] Many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar.[12] During this time she was refused admission to the Harvard writing seminar.[10] Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 by crawling under her house and taking her mother's sleeping pills.[13]

Sidgwick Hall at Newnham College, University of Cambridge

She survived this first suicide attempt after lying unfound in a crawl space for three days, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion."[1] She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Dr. Ruth Beuscher.[1] Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith scholarship were paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had successfully recovered from a mental breakdown herself. Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis, The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with highest honors.[14]

She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the three women-only colleges of Cambridge University in England, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard.[15] She spent her first year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe.[1]

Career and marriage

Plath's stay at McLean Hospital inspired her novel The Bell Jar

Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party in Cambridge.[16] In a 1961 BBC interview (now held by the British Library Sound Archive),[17] Plath describes how she met Ted Hughes:

I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that's actually where we met... Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later... We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.[17]

Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God".[1]

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.

“
”

from "The Colossus",
The Colossus and Other Poems, 1960

The couple married on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr Holborn in the London Borough of Camden with Plath's mother in attendance, and spent their honeymoon in Benidorm. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year.[1] During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija boards. In early 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States and from September 1957 Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write[14] and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evening sat in on creative writing seminars given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).[14] Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her experience and she did so. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempts with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to conceive of herself as a more serious, focused poet and short-story writer.[1] At this time Plath and Hughes first met the poet W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.[18] Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.[1]

Chalcot Square, near Primrose Hill in London, Plath and Hughes' home from 1959

Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York State in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material.[1][19] The couple moved back to the United Kingdom in December 1959 and[20] lived in London at 3 Chalcot Square, near the Primrose Hill area of Regent's Park, where an English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence.[21] Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1, 1960 and in October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus.[20] In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event.[22] In August she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and immediately after this, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. Nicholas was born in January 1962.[20] In mid-1962, Hughes began to keep bees, which would be the subject of many Plath poems.[1]

In 1961, the couple rented their flat at Chalcot Square to Assia and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately struck with the beautiful Assia, as she was with him.[23] In June 1962, Plath had had a car accident which she described as one of many suicide attempts. In July 1962, Plath discovered Hughes had been having an affair with Assia Wevill and in September the couple separated.[20]

Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection Ariel during the final months of her life.[20][24][25] In December 1962, she returned alone to London with their children, and rented, on a five-year lease, a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road—only a few streets from the Chalcot Square flat. William Butler Yeats once lived in the house, which bears an English Heritage blue plaque for the Irish poet. Plath was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.

The northern winter of 1962–3 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, the children—now two years old and nine months—were often sick, and the house had no telephone.[26] Her depression returned but she completed the rest of her poetry collection which would be published after her death (1965 in the UK, 1966 in the US). Her only novel, The Bell Jar, came out in January 1963, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas, and was met with critical indifference.[27]

23 Fitzroy Road, near Primrose Hill, London, where Plath committed suicide

Death

Before her death Plath tried several times to take her own life.[28] On August 24, 1953 Plath overdosed on pills in the cellar of her mother's home. In June, 1962 Plath drove her car off the side of the road, into a river. When questioned about the incident by police she admitted to trying to take her own life.

Dr. John Horder, a close friend who lived near Plath, prescribed her antidepressants a few days before her suicide. Knowing she was at risk alone with two young children, he says he visited her daily and made strenuous efforts to have her admitted to a hospital; when that failed, he arranged for a live-in nurse. Commentators have argued that because antidepressants may take up to three weeks to take effect, her prescription from Horder would not have taken full effect.

The nurse was due to arrive at 9:00 the morning of February 11, 1963 to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she could not get into the flat, but eventually gained access with the help of a workman, Charles Langridge. They found Plath dead of carbon monoxide poisoning with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with wet towels and cloths.[29] At approximately 4:30 am, Plath had placed her head in the oven, with the gas turned on.[30] She was 30 years old.

Some have suggested that Plath had not intended to kill herself. That morning, she asked her downstairs neighbor, a Mr. Thomas, what time he would be leaving. She also left a note reading "Call Dr. Horder," including the doctor's phone number. Therefore, it is argued Plath turned on the gas at a time when Mr. Thomas would have been able to see the note.[31] However, in her biography Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Plath's best friend, Jillian Becker wrote, "According to Mr. Goodchild, a police officer attached to the coroner's office ... [Plath] had thrust her head far into the gas oven... [and] had really meant to die."[32] Dr. Horder also believed her intention was clear. He stated that "No one who saw the care with which the kitchen was prepared could have interpreted her action as anything but an irrational compulsion."[30] Plath had described the quality of her despair as "owl's talons clenching my heart."[33] In his 1971 book on suicide, friend and critic Al Alvarez claimed that Plath's suicide was an unanswered cry for help.[30][34][35]

Following Plath's death

Plath's grave at Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire

An inquiry on the day following Plath's death gave a ruling of suicide. Hughes was devastated; they had been separated five months. In a letter to an old friend of Plath's from Smith College, he wrote, "That's the end of my life. The rest is posthumous."[26][36] Plath's gravestone, in Heptonstall's parish churchyard of St Thomas the Apostle, bears the inscription that Hughes chose for her:[37] "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Biographers variously attribute the source of the quote to the 16th-century Buddhist novel Journey to the West written by Wu Cheng'en[38][39] or to the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.[37]

The gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath."[40] When Hughes' partner Assia Wevill killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified. After each defacement, Hughes had the damaged stone removed, sometimes leaving the site unmarked during repair. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring her name by removing the stone.[41] Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill.[35] In 1970, radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath;[41][42] other radical feminists threatened to kill him in Plath's name.[30] Plath's poem "The jailor" was included in the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Morgan.[43]

In 1989, with Hughes under public attack, a battle raged in the letters pages of The Guardian and The Independent. In The Guardian on April 20, 1989, Hughes wrote the article "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace": "In the years soon after [Plath's] death, when scholars approached me, I tried to take their apparently serious concern for the truth about Sylvia Plath seriously. But I learned my lesson early. [...] If I tried too hard to tell them exactly how something happened, in the hope of correcting some fantasy, I was quite likely to be accused of trying to suppress Free Speech. In general, my refusal to have anything to do with the Plath Fantasia has been regarded as an attempt to suppress Free Speech [...] The Fantasia about Sylvia Plath is more needed than the facts. Where that leaves respect for the truth of her life (and of mine), or for her memory, or for the literary tradition, I do not know."[41][44]

On March 16, 2009, Nicholas Hughes, the son of Plath and Hughes, hanged himself at his home in Alaska, following a history of depression.[45][46]

Works

Plath wrote poetry from the age of eight, her first poem appearing in the Boston Traveller.[1] By the time she arrived at Smith College she had written over 50 short stories and published in a raft of magazines.[47] At Smith she majored in English and won all the major prizes in writing and scholarship. Additionally, she won a summer guest editor position at the college magazine Mademoiselle, and, on her graduation in 1955, she won the Glascock Prize for Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea. Later at Cambridge, she wrote for the University publication, Varsity. By the time Heinemann published her first collection, The Colossus and other poems in the UK in late 1960, Plath had been short-listed several times in the Yale Younger Poets book competition and had had work printed in Harper's, The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. All the poems in The Colossus had already been printed in major US and British journals and she had a contract with The New Yorker.[48] It was, however, her 1965 collection Ariel, published posthumously, on which Plath's reputation essentially rests.

In 1971, the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the UK, including nine previously unseen poems from the original manuscript of Ariel.[27] Writing in New Statesman, fellow poet Peter Porter wrote:

"Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works. Its most striking impression is of a front-rank artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such is Plath's control that the book possesses a singularity and certainty which should make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel.[49]

The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, posthumously.[27] In 2006 Anna Journey, then a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath titled Ennui. The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.[Notes 1]

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

“
”

from the poem Ariel, October 12, 1962[50]

According to Hughes, Plath left behind "some one hundred thirty [typed] pages of another novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970."[51]

Double Exposure

In 1963, after Plath's The Bell Jar was published, she began working on another literary work titled Double Exposure. Although never published, Double Exposure disappeared around 1970.[52] The theories of what happened to the unfinished manuscript are repeatedly brought up in the novel Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A critical study by Luke Ferretter. It is said by Luke Ferretter that the rare books department at Smith College in Massachusetts has a secret copy of the typescript under seal.[52] Ferretter believes that the draft of Double Exposure may have been destroyed, stolen, or even lost. He presumes in his book that the draft may lie unfound in a university archive.[52]

The Colossus received largely positive UK reviews, highlighting her voice as new and strong, individual and American in tone. Peter Dickinson at Punch called the collection "a real find" and "exhilarating to read", full of "clean, easy verse".[48] Bernard Bergonzi at the Manchester Guardian said the book was an "outstanding technical accomplishment" with a "virtuoso quality".[48] From the point of publication she became a presence on the poetry scene. The book went on to be published in America in 1962 to less glowing reviews. Whilst her craft was generally praised, her writing was viewed as more derivative of other poets.[48] Some later critics have described the first book as somewhat young, staid or conventional in comparison to the more free-flowing imagery and intensity of her later work.

It was Sylvia's publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame. As soon as it was published critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect, and remains so.[1] Time and Life both reviewed the slim volume of Ariel in the wake of her death.[30] The critic at Time said: "Within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. 'Daddy' was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, 'Daddy' was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bile across the literary landscape. [...] In her most ferocious poems, 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus,' fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that 'play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.'"[53][Notes 2]

Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius."[30] Writer Honor Moore describes Ariel as marking the beginning of a movement, Plath suddenly visible as "a woman on paper", certain and audacious. Moore says: "When Sylvia Plath’s Ariel was published in the United States in 1966, American women noticed. Not only women who ordinarily read poems, but housewives and mothers whose ambitions had awakened [...] Here was a woman, superbly trained in her craft, whose final poems uncompromisingly charted female rage, ambivalence, and grief, in a voice with which many women identified."[54]

The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012.[55]

Themes

Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore.[47] Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.[47]

Plath's landscape poetry, which she wrote throughout her life, has been described as "a rich and important area of her work that is often overlooked ... some of the best of which was written about the Yorkshire moors." Her September 1961 poem "Wuthering Heights"[56] takes its title from the Emily Brontë novel, but its content and style is Plath's own particular vision of the Pennine landscape.[57]

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry. Robert Lowell's poetry may have played a part in this shift as she cited Lowell's 1959 book Life Studies as a significant influence, in an interview just before her death.[58] Posthumously published in 1966, the impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its dark and potentially autobiographical descriptions of mental illness in poems such as '"Tulips", "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus".[58] Plath's work is often held within the genre of confessional poetry and the style of her work compared to other contemporaries, such as Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass. Plath's close friend Al Alvarez, who has written about her extensively, said of her later work: "Plath's case is complicated by the fact that, in her mature work, she deliberately used the details of her everyday life as raw material for her art. A casual visitor or unexpected telephone call, a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick—everything became usable, charged with meaning, transformed. Her poems are full of references and images that seem impenetrable at this distance, but which could mostly be explained in footnotes by a scholar with full access to the details of her life."[59] Many of Plath's later poems deal with what one critic calls the "domestic surreal" in which Plath takes every day elements of life and twists the images, giving them an almost nightmarish quality. Plath's poem Morning Song from Ariel is regarded as one of the best poems in the world on freedom of expression of an artist.[60]

Plath's fellow confessional poet and friend Anne Sexton commented: "Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicide, in detail and in depth—between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia and I often talked opposites. We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric lightbulb, sucking on it. She told the story of her first suicide in sweet and loving detail, and her description in The Bell Jar is just that same story."[61] The confessional interpretation of Plath's work has led to some dismissing certain aspects of her work as an exposition of sentimentalist melodrama; in 2010, for example, Theodore Dalrymple asserted that Plath had been the "patron saint of self-dramatization" and of self-pity.[62] Revisionist critics such as Tracy Brain have, however, argued against a tightly autobiographical interpretation of Plath's material.[63][64][65]

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

“
”

from Morning Song, Ariel, 1965[66]

Journals and letters

Plath's letters were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection, Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963, came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of The Bell Jar in America.[27] Plath had kept a diary from the age of 11 until her death, doing so until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death.[67]

During the last years of his life, Hughes began working on a fuller publication of Plath's journals. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals, and passed the project onto his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her editing in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. More than half of the new volume contained newly released material;[67] The American author Joyce Carol Oates hailed the publication as a "genuine literary event". Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he claims to have destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. In the foreword of the 1982 version, he writes, "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)."[1][68]

The Bell Jar

Main article: The Bell Jar

Plath's semi-autobiographical novel, which her mother wished to block, was published in 1963 and in the US in 1971.[69][27] Describing the compilation of the book to her mother, she wrote, "What I've done is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalising to add colour – it's a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown.... I've tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar".[70] She described her novel as "an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past".[71] She dated a Yale senior named Dick Norton during her junior year. Norton, upon whom the character of Buddy in The Bell Jar is based, contracted tuberculosis and was treated at the Ray Brook Sanatorium near Saranac Lake. While visiting Norton, Plath broke her leg skiing, an incident that was fictionalized in the novel.[72]

Hughes controversy

And here you come, with a cup of tea
Wreathed in steam.
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.
You hand me two children, two roses.

“
”

from Kindness, written February 1, 1963. Ariel

As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work. Hughes has been condemned repeatedly for burning Plath's last journal, saying he "did not want her children to have to read it."[73] He lost another journal and an unfinished novel and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013.[73][74] Hughes has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.[75][76]

Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium, Hughes published Birthday Letters in 1998, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's subsequent suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped best seller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes was suffering from terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book went on to win the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath took her own life.[77]

In October 2015 the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes' life and work and included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father.[78]

Portrayals in media

Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Frieda Hughes, now a poet and painter, who was two years old when her mother died, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' lives. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by the family's tragedies.[79]

Plath's voice is heard in the BBC documentary about her life.[80]

"My Mother"

In 2003, Frieda published the poem "My Mother" in Tatler:

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children

 [...] they think
I should give them my mother's words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll [1]

  1. ^ Hughes, Frieda (2003). "My Mother". The Book of Mirrors. 

List of works

Poetry collections

Collected prose and novels

Children's books

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Two poems titled Ennui (I) and Ennui (II) are listed in a partial catalogue of Plath's juvenilia in the Collected Poems. A note explains that the texts of all but half a dozen of the many pieces listed are in the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. The rest are with the Sylvia Plath Estate.
  2. ↑ Plath has been criticized for her numerous and controversial allusions to the Holocaust. See The Boot in the Face: The Problem of the Holocaust in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Sally Brown and Clare L. Taylor, "Plath, Sylvia (1932–1963)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
  2. ↑ Kirk (2004) p2
  3. 1 2 3 Steven Axelrod. "Sylvia Plath". The Literary Encyclopedia, 17 Sept. 2003, The Literary Dictionary Company (April 24, 2007), University of California Riverside. Retrieved 2007-06-01.
  4. ↑ "A celebration, this is". Sylviaplath.info. Retrieved 2014-03-11.
  5. ↑ Kirk (2004) p23
  6. 1 2 3 "Sylvia Plath | Academy of American Poets". www.poets.org. Retrieved 2016-04-27.
  7. ↑ Kirk (2004) p32
  8. ↑ Plath Helle (2007) p41-44
  9. ↑ Plath, Sylvia Johnny Panic, p124.
  10. 1 2 Brown, Sally & Taylor, Clare L. (2004). "Plath , Sylvia (1932–1963)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press).
  11. ↑ Thomas, David N. (2008). Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas?. p. 35. ISBN 978-1854114808.
  12. ↑ Wagner-Martin (1988) p108
  13. ↑ Kibler, James E. Jr (1980) Dictionary of Literary Biography, 2nd, volume 6; American Novelists Since World War II. Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, University of Georgia. The Gale Group pp. 259–264
  14. 1 2 3 Kirk (2004) pxix
  15. ↑ Helle (2007) p44
  16. ↑ "Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes meet — History.com This Day in History — 2/25/1956". History.com. Retrieved 2014-03-11.
  17. 1 2 Guardian Audio. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes talk about their relationship April 15, 2010. Extract from BBC interview with Plath and Hughes 1961. Now held in British Library Sound Archive Accessed 2010-07-09
  18. ↑ Helle (2007)
  19. ↑ Journals pp. 520–521
  20. 1 2 3 4 5 Kirk (2004) pxx
  21. ↑ "Plaque: Sylvia Plath" at londonremembers.com
  22. ↑ Kirk (2004) p85
  23. ↑ Feinstein, Elaine (2001) Ted Hughes – The Life of a Poet pp120-124 Weidenfeld & Nicholson
  24. ↑ Poetry Archive: Plath Biog accessed 2010-07-09
  25. ↑ Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—a marriage examined. From The Contemporary Review. Essay by Richard Whittington-Egan 2005 accessed 2010-07-09
  26. 1 2 Gifford, Terry (2008). Ted Hughes. Routledge. p15 ISBN 0-415-31189-6
  27. 1 2 3 4 5 Kirk (2004) pxxi
  28. ↑ "Sylvia Plath and the depression continuum" by Brian Cooper, MD at ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  29. ↑ Stevenson (1998) Mariner Books
  30. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Rhyme, reason and depression". (February 16, 1993). The Guardian. Accessed 2010-07-09.
  31. ↑ Kirk (2004) p103
  32. ↑ Becker. (2003)
  33. ↑ Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer (October 30, 2005). "The Allure: Beauty and an easy route to death have long made the Golden Gate Bridge a magnet for suicides". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved July 29, 2012.
  34. ↑ Al Alvarez, a poet, editor and literary champion of Hughes and Plath, spoke, in a BBC interview in March 2000, about his failure to recognize Plath's depression. Alvarez says he regretted his inability to offer emotional support to Plath: "I failed her on that level. I was thirty years old and stupid. What did I know about chronic clinical depression? [...] She kind of needed someone to take care of her. And that was not something I could do."
  35. 1 2 I failed her. I was 30 and stupid The Observer March 19, 2000 Accessed 2010-07-09
  36. ↑ Smith College. Plath papers. Series 6, Hughes. Plath archive.
  37. 1 2 Kirk (2004) p104
  38. ↑ Carmody and Carmody (1996) Mysticism: Holiness East and West. Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-508819-0
  39. ↑ Cheng'en Wu, translated and abridged by Arthur Waley (1942) Monkey: Folk Novel of China. UNESCO collection, Chinese series. Grove Press
  40. ↑ Short news report on Plath's grave, featuring some of her poetry on YouTube
  41. 1 2 3 Badia, Janet and Jennifer Phegle. (2005). Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present. University of Toronto Press. p252 ISBN 0-8020-8928-3.
  42. ↑ Robin Morgan's Official website Accessed 2010-07-09
  43. ↑ "Sisterhood is powerful : an anthology of writings from the women's liberation movement (Book, 1970)". [WorldCat.org]. Retrieved 2015-05-08.
  44. ↑ Hughes, Ted. "The Place Where Sylvia Plath Should Rest in Peace". Guardian Article. April 20, 1989
  45. ↑ "Son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes kills himself Guardian article March 23, 2009 Accessed 2010-07-09
  46. ↑ "Poet Plath's son takes own life March 23, 2009 BBC article Accessed 2010-07-09.
  47. 1 2 3 Anne Stevenson "Plath, Sylvia" The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford University Press
  48. 1 2 3 4 Wagner-Martin (1988) p2–5
  49. ↑ Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus and Other Poems, Faber and Faber, 1977.
  50. ↑ Guardian article Ariel March 13, 2008 Accessed 2010-07-09
  51. ↑ "The Ghost of Plath’s Double Exposure". Lost Manuscripts. 2010-08-29. Retrieved 2012-04-06.
  52. 1 2 3 Ferretter, Luke. Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A critical Study. Edinburgh University Press; 1 edition. ISBN 0748625100.
  53. ↑ Time magazine article. The Blood Jet Is Poetry. Friday, Jun. 10, 1966 Accessed 2010-07-09
  54. ↑ Boston Review. Article by Honor Moore. March/April 2009. After Ariel: Celebrating the poetry of the women’s movement Accessed 2010-07-09
  55. ↑ Guardian
  56. ↑ Sylvia PLath. "Wuthering Heights". .poemhunter.com/. Retrieved July 31, 2013.
  57. ↑ "A Poet's Guide to Britain: Sylvia Plath". bbc.co.uk. May 11, 2009. Retrieved July 31, 2013.
  58. 1 2 Wagner-Martin (1988) p184
  59. ↑ Alvarez (2007) p214
  60. ↑ ""Morning Song" – World Poems on Freedom of Expression". in Uncontrolled Pen – Features
  61. ↑ "The Paris Review Interviews:The Art of Poetry No. 15. Anne Sexton" Interview by Barbara Kevles. Issue 52, Summer 1971. Accessed 2010-07-15
  62. ↑ Dalrymple, Theodore (2010). Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. Gibson Square Books Ltd. p. 157. ISBN 1-906142-61-0.
  63. ↑ Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Essex: Longman, 2001
  64. ↑ Brain, Tracy. "Dangerous Confessions: The Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically." Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays. Ed. Jo Gill.
  65. ↑ The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2007. Ed. Anita Helle.
  66. ↑ Jeanette Winterson Website: Plath's Morning Song Accessed 2010-07-09
  67. 1 2 Kirk (2004) pxxii
  68. ↑ Wagner-Martin (1988) p313
  69. ↑ The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial Classics Edition. ISBN 0-06-093018-7 p xii. Introduction by Frances McCullough
  70. ↑ Plath Biographical Note 294–5. From Wagner-Martin (1988) p. 107
  71. ↑ Plath Biographical Note 293. From Wagner-Martin (1988) p112
  72. ↑ Taylor, Robert (1986). America's Magic Mountain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37905-9
  73. 1 2 Christodoulides, Nephie (2005) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking: Motherhood in Sylvia Plath's Work. Rodopi Ltd. pix ISBN 90-420-1772-4
  74. ↑ Guardian article October 20, 2003: Desperately seeking Sylvia Accessed 2010-07-09
  75. ↑ Gill, Jo (2006) The Cambridge companion to Sylvia Plath Cambridge University Press p9-10 ISBN 0-521-84496-7
  76. ↑ Hughes, Frieda ed. (2004) Ariel: The Restored Edition, Faber and Faber pxvii
  77. ↑ Guardian article. "The Happy Couple" February 1, 1998. Accessed 2010-07-15
  78. ↑ "BBC Two - Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death". Bbc.co.uk. 10 October 2015. Retrieved 10 October 2015.
  79. ↑ "Plath film angers daughter". BBC. February 3, 2003. Retrieved July 9, 2010.
  80. ↑ Sylvia Plath. BBC.

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