Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath
Cover of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life by Linda Wagner-Martin
Born:	October 27, 1932 Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Died:	February 11, 1963 London, England
Occupation:	poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist
Nationality:	American
Literary movement:	confessional poetry

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

Most famous as a poet, Plath is also known for The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel detailing her struggle with depression. Plath and Anne Sexton are credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry that Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass initiated.

Contents 1 Sylvia's life 2 Her death 3 Her work 3.1 Journals 3.2 Poems 3.3 The Ted Hughes controversy 4 Bibliography 4.1 Poetry 4.1.1 Books 4.1.2 Notable poems 4.2 Prose 4.3 Children's books 5 See also 6 References 7 Biographies 8 Other works on Sylvia 9 External links

[edit] Sylvia's life

Sylvia was born on the 27 October 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (a historic neighborhood in Boston) to Aurelia Schober Plath, a first-generation American of Austrian descent, and Otto Emile Plath, an emigrant from Grabow, Germany, and a professor at Boston University. Otto's specialty was entomology, and he was a noted authority on bees. Aurelia was approximately 20 years younger than her husband.^{[citation needed]}

Sylvia's early childhood was spent in Winthrop, Massachusetts. The Plath family moved to Winthrop in 1936 during the Great Depression. Sylvia's mother, Aurelia, had grown up in Winthrop, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, lived on Point Shirley, a section of the small town. It was here that Sylvia had her first poem published, in the Boston Herald's children's section, when she was eight years old. Around the same time, her father died of pneumonia and complications from diabetes on November 5, 1940. Aurelia Plath then moved her children and her parents to Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1942.^{[citation needed]}

In her junior year at Smith College, Plath made the first of her suicide attempts. She later included details of her attempted suicide in the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Sylvia was briefly committed to a mental institution, McLean Hospital. She seemed to make an acceptable recovery and graduated from Smith with honors in 1955. She obtained a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University where she pursued her poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. It was at Cambridge that she met English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956.^{[citation needed]}

Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the United States, where Plath taught at Smith. They then moved to Boston where Plath sat in on seminars given by Robert Lowell. Also attending Lowell's seminars was Anne Sexton. At this time, Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin who admired their work and was to remain a lifelong friend.^{[citation needed]}

On hearing that Plath was pregnant, the couple moved back to the United Kingdom. Plath and Hughes lived in London for a while and then settled in the small market town of North Tawton in Devon. While there, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. In February 1961, she suffered a miscarriage, and a number of her poems address this event.^{[citation needed]}

Soon, Plath's marriage to Hughes met with many difficulties (particularly his passionate affair with Assia Wevill), and they separated. She returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas, and rented a flat in a house where W.B. Yeats once lived. Sylvia was pleased by this fact and considered it a good omen.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Her death

Sylvia Plath took her own life on the morning of 11 February 1963. She left out cookies and milk and completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children with tape.^[1] Plath then placed her head in the oven in her kitchen while the gas was turned on.

It has been suggested that Plath's timing and planning of this suicide attempt was too precise, too coincidental, and that she had not meant to succeed in killing herself. Apparently, she had previously asked Mr. Thomas, her downstairs neighbor, what time he would be leaving, and a note had been placed that read "Call Dr. Horder" and listed his phone number.^[2] Thus, it is argued, Plath must have turned the gas on at a time when Mr. Thomas should have been waking and beginning his day. This theory maintains that the gas seeped through the floor and knocked out Mr. Thomas and another resident of the floor below for several hours. Also, an au pair girl was to arrive at nine o'clock that morning to help Plath with the care of her children. Arriving promptly at nine, the au pair could not get into the flat, but was eventually let in by painters, who had a key to the front door.

However, in her illusion-shattering book Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Jillian Becker says that, "according to Mr. Goodchild—a police officer attached to the coroner's office . . . she had thrust her head far into the gas oven. 'She had really meant to die.'"

Plath's gravestone bears the inscription "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted." Following her death, the gravestone was repeatedly vandalized with supporters of Plath chiselling off the name "Hughes." This practice intensified following the death of Hughes' second wife Assia Wevill in 1969, which led to claims of domestic violence by Hughes against Plath.^[3]

[edit] Her work

[edit] Journals

Plath began keeping a diary at age 11, and kept journals until her suicide. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as "The Journals of Sylvia Plath," edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired all of Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013 (50 years after Plath's death). During his last years of 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 Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. Kukil finished her edits in December 1999, and in 2000 Anchor Books published "The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath." According to the back cover, roughly two-thirds of the "Unabridged Journals" is newly unreleased material. The publication was hailed as a "genuine literary event" by Joyce Carol Oates.

Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he destroyed Plath's last journal, which contained entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. "I destroyed [the last of her journals] because I did not want her children to have read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival)": Hughes, in the Foreword to Plath's "Journals" 1982.

[edit] Poems

Plath has been heavily criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust, and is known for her uncanny use of metaphor. Her work has been compared to and associated with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets.

While critics initially responded favorably to Plath's first book, The Colossus, it has also been described as conventional and lacking the drama of her later works.

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more confessional area of poetry. It is possible Lowell's poetry—which was often labeled "confessional"—played a part in this shift. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its maudlin descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as "Daddy."

The extent of Hughes' influence has been a topic of great debate. Plath's poems are written as if in her own voice, and the similarities between the two poets' works are slight.

In 1982, Plath became the seond poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (for "The Collected Poems").

In 2006, Anna Journey, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, discovered a previously unpublished sonnet titled "Ennui." The poem, composed during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.

[edit] The Ted Hughes controversy

As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath’s personal and literary estates. This is controversial, as it is uncertain whether or not Plath had begun divorce proceedings before her death: if she had, Hughes' inheritance of the Plath estate would have been in dispute. In letters to Aurelia Plath and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she was applying for a divorce. However, Hughes said in a letter to The Guardian that Plath did not seriously consider divorce, and claims they were discussing reconciliation mere days before her death. However, he oversaw the publication of her manuscripts, including Ariel (1965). He claims to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last few months together.

Many critics accused Hughes of attempting to control the publications for his own ends, though he denied this. Examples cited include his censoring of parts of her journals that portrayed him unfavorably, and his editing of Ariel, changing the order of the poems in the book from the sequence she had intended and left at her death, as well as removing several poems. Critics argue this prevented what was intended to be a more uplifting beginning and ending of Ariel, and that the poems removed were the ones most readily identified as being about Hughes.

Hughes hired an accountant to keep track of the estate, but the accountant did a poor job. A large and looming tax bill caused Hughes to convince Plath's mother, Aurelia, to publish The Bell Jar in the United States. Because of this, she later asked Hughes' permission to publish a volume of Plath's letters, to which he agreed with strong reservations.

Hughes' sister Olwyn eventually took over much of the duties of executor of the Plath estate, but like Hughes was seen as being overly aggressive in limiting permissions if the works cast Hughes in an unfavorable light.

Despite criticism and biographies published after her death, the debate about Plath's work resembles a struggle between readers who side with her and readers who side with Hughes.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Books

The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) Ariel (1965) Crossing the Water (1971)

Winter Trees (1972) The Collected Poems (1981)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Sylvia Plath

[edit] Notable poems

"Cut" "Daddy" "Ennui" "Lady Lazarus" "Mad Girl's Love Song" "Metaphors"

"Mirror" "Morning Song" "Mushrooms" "Poppies in July" "Sow"

[edit] Prose

• The Bell Jar (1963) under the pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas' (a film version of The Bell Jar was made in 1979)
• Letters Home (1975) to and edited by her mother
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977) (the UK edition contains two stories, the US edition does not)
• The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
• The Magic Mirror (1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
• The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)

[edit] Children's books

• The Bed Book (1976)
• The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996)
• Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001)
• Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)
• A number of "limited edition" works were published by specialist publishers, often with very small print runs.

[edit] See also

• Confessional poet
• Poetry of the United States
• Sylvia Plath effect

[edit] References

[edit] Biographies

• Sylvia Plath (2004, Chelsea House, Great Writers Series) by Peter K. Steinberg, ISBN 0-7910-7843-4
• Sylvia Plath: Method & Madness (A Biography) (2004, Schaffner Press, 2Rev Ed) by Edward Butscher, ISBN 0-9710-5982-9
• Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (2003, Palgrave Macmillan, 2Rev Ed) by Linda Wagner-Martin, ISBN 1-4039-1653-5
• Her Husband: Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath, a Marriage (2003, Viking Adult) by Diane Middlebrook, ISBN 0-670-03187-9
• Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (1991, Da Capo Press) by Paul Alexander, ISBN 0-3068-1299-1
• The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991, Carol Publishing) by Ronald Hayman, ISBN 1-5597-2068-9

[edit] Other works on Sylvia

[edit] External links

SylviaPlath.info Sylvia Plath page Sylvia Plath (Italian) Literary Encyclopedia biography Biography

Sylvia Plath Forum Sylvia Plath at Neurotic Poets Sylvia Plath's Gravesite Poetry of Sylvia Plath Listen online: "November Graveyard"

Persondata
NAME	Plath, Sylvia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist
DATE OF BIRTH	October 27, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH	Boston, Massachusetts, United States
DATE OF DEATH	February 11, 1963
PLACE OF DEATH	London, England