Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath: 1932-1963

Biography:

• Born to well-educated parents in the Boston area
• Father taught German and zoology at Boston University
• Father died when she was 8 years old of gangrene; had to have a leg amputated for a diabetic condition he refused to treat
• Money was tight following his death; her mother had to go back to work teaching and her maternal grandparents moved in with the family
• Published poetry, fiction, and journalism even before attending Smith College, where she continued to succeed as a writer
• At the same time, she was “very much a woman of the 1950s, plagued with thoughts that she would have to marry and have children, or else she would never be a ‘complete’ female” (Wagner-Martin 2594)
• These conflicts over direction combined with a family tendency for mental illness probably led to her nervous breakdown the summer of 1953 (between her junior and senior years)
• Outpatient electroconvulsive therapy only made things worse and she attempted suicide in August, after which she spent four months in psychiatric care
• June 1955: Graduates summa cum laude from Smith
• Earns a Fulbright Fellowship and completes her M.A. at Cambridge in the UK
• June 1956: Marries Ted Hughes, a British poet who would eventually become the poet laureate of England
• 1957: The couple returns to the US, where Plath teaches freshman English at Smith
• She and Hughes establish themselves as professional writers
• 1959: Return to England
• Period from 1960 to 1963 is extremely important: great literary output and personal change and turmoil
• 1960: Daughter Frieda is born
• 1962: Son Nicholas is born
• Summer 1962: Marriage breaks up
• February 1963: Commits suicide

Works and Criticism:

• 1960: The Colossus and Other Poems
• 1963: The Bell Jar
• 1965: Ariel
• 1981: Collected Poems (wins Pulitzer Prize)
• “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 rarer joy and a poignant understanding of women’s various roles” (Wagner-Martin 2595)
• “Her breaking out of the conventional patterns set and example that shaped a great deal of poetry from 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” (Wagner-Martin 2595)
• “Plath appropriates a centrally American tradition: the heroic ego confronting the sublime, but she brilliantly reverses the tradition by turning Emerson’s ‘great crescive self’ into a heroine instead of a hero” (Baym 2776)
• “For all her courting of excess, Plath is a remarkably controlled writer; her lucid stanzas, her clear diction, her dazzling alterations of sound are evidence of that control” (Baym 2778)  

Works Cited
Baym, Nina, Editor. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Shorter Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Sylvia Plath. The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Concise Edition. Ed Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. 2594-2495.