Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and her works include The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. The Collected Poems were published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously.
Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then the University of Cambridge in England, where she was a Fulbright student at Newnham College. In 1959, Plath took a creative writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Within this seminar, Plath, Lowell and Sexton, whilst starting with very different writing styles, each gravitated towards a new style of poetry dubbed confessional for its use of personal experience and its tendency to use a direct form of address. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 in London. In 1957, they briefly moved to the United States, but moved back to England in the winter of 1959. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962.
Critic Al Alvarez views Plath as part of a generation that helped establish a new artistic myth, in contrast to the Eliot generation, which championed the impersonality of art and the "extinction of personality". In his view Plath and her contemporaries fused their inner lives with their artistic output. Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius". Plath suffered a lifelong battle with severe depression, often characterized as a bipolar-type illness, leading to multiple traumatic treatments with early model electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She died by suicide at age 30 in London on February 11, 1963.
Biography Early life and education Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was the American-born daughter of Austrian immigrants, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow in Prussia, German Empire. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees in 1934.
On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren Joseph was born. In 1936 the family moved from 24 Prince Street in Jamaica Plain to 92 Johnson Avenue, Winthrop, Massachusetts. Since 1920, Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry.
Based on her poetry and journals, the power dynamic between Plath's parents was characterized by a strict, patriarchal structure in which her father, Otto Plath, held absolute authority, while her mother, Aurelia Plath, was perceived as a subservient yet ultimately managing figure. Plath's work, particularly “Daddy”, presents this dynamic as a source of deep emotional trauma where her father is viewed as an oppressive “god” and her mother as a passive figure.
Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after his daughter's eighth birthday, 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. Plath's outlook on religion and lifestyle changed dramatically due to his strict atheism and controlling demeanor, and his premature death led Plath to believe her “sky is empty”. Her father was buried in Winthrop Cemetery in 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. Plath commented in her essay "Ocean 1212-W", one of her final works, that her first nine years "sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth".
Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the Boston Heralds children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. 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. "Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed."
Plath attended Bradford Senior High School, which is now Wellesley High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, graduating in 1950. An influential English teacher was Wilbury Crockett, who she referred to as "my own Mr. Crockett". Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in The Christian Science Monitor.
College years and depression
In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where she excelled academically. While at Smith, she first lived in Haven House and later in Lawrence House, where a plaque can be found outside her old room. She edited The Smith Review. After her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. Plath was one of twenty women offered the position, which entailed writing short stories and interviewing people such as Elizabeth Bowen in Cambridge. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar.
She was furious at not being at a meeting that Mademoiselle editor Cyrilly Abels had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a writer whose work she loved, according to one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She loitered 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 kill herself." During this time, she was not accepted into a Harvard University writing seminar with author Frank O'Connor. Following ECT for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt on August 24, 1953, by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.
She survived this first suicide attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion". She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Ruth Beuscher. Her stay at McLean Hospital and her Smith scholarship were paid for by the author Olive Higgins Prouty, who had also recovered from a mental breakdown. According to Plath's biographer Andrew Wilson, Olive Higgins Prouty "would take Dr. Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide attempt".
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 an A.B., summa cum laude. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society, and had an IQ of around 160.
She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she lived in Whitstead, a detached house situated on the edge of the college grounds. Plath 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. She spent her first-year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe.
Career and marriage
Plath met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party to launch a poetry journal, St. Botolph's Review. In a 1961 BBC interview now held by the British Library Sound Archive, Extract from the 1961 BBC interview with Plath and Hughes. Now held in the British Library Sound Archive. Plath describes how she met Hughes: Plath described Hughes as "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer" with "a voice like the thunder of God".
The couple were married only four months after they met, on June 16, 1956, at St George the Martyr in Holborn, London, and in honor of Bloomsday, with Plath's mother as the sole witness. They spent their honeymoon in Paris and Benidorm, Spain. Plath returned to Newnham in October to begin her second year. During this time, they both became deeply interested in astrology and the supernatural, using ouija boards.Bloom, Harold (2007) Sylvia Plath, Infobase Publishing, p. 76
In June 1957, Plath and Hughes moved to the United States; beginning in September, Plath taught at Smith College, her alma mater. She found it difficult to both teach and have enough time and energy to write, and in the middle of 1958, the couple moved to Boston, where they lived at 9 Willow St. in Beacon Hill. Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and in the evenings attended a creative writing seminar given by poet Robert Lowell (also attended by the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck).
Both Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her personal experience. She openly discussed her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempt with Sexton, who led her to write from a more female perspective. Plath began to consider herself as a more serious, focused writer. At this time, Plath and Hughes met the poet W.S. Merwin, who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend. Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment in December, working with Ruth Beuscher.
In summer 1959, Plath and Hughes went on an eight-week camping trip across Canada, the United States and Mexico, after which they stayed at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, in fall. Plath stated that at Yaddo she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material.
The couple moved back to England in December 1959 and 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 from 1960 to 1961. Their daughter Frieda Rebecca was born on April 1, 1960, and in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first collection of poetry.
In February 1961, Plath's second pregnancy ended in miscarriage; several of her poems, including "Parliament Hill Fields", address this event. In August, she finished her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar; immediately afterwards, the family moved to Court Green in the small market town of North Tawton, Devon. Her son Nicholas Farrar was born on January 17, 1962. In mid-1962, Plath and Hughes began to keep bees, which would become the subject of many of her poems, including “Beekeeper’s Daughter,” “Arrival of the Bee Box,” “The Bee Meeting,” “Stings,” and “Swarm”.