Sylvia Plath
Born: 27 October 1932, Massachusetts, USA
Nationality: American
Died: 11 February 1963, London, UK
Plath was a poet and novelist. Through her work, she advanced the genre of confessional poetry. She married Ted Hughes in 1956, although they divorced in 1962. Clinically depressive for most of her adult life, Plath committed suicide in 1963, gaining accolades posthumously for her novel ‘The Bell Jar’ and the poetry collections ‘The Colossus’ and ‘Ariel.’ In 1982, she became the first person to win a posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father died a week and a half after her eighth birthday. Raised as a Unitarian, after her father’s death, she experienced a loss of faith and remained undecided in religious matters throughout her life. Plath attended Bradford Senior High School graduating in 1950. After graduation, she had her first national publication in the Christian Science Monitor.
Plath attended Smith College, a private women’s liberal arts college, in 1950 where she excelled academically. She edited the Smith Review and after her third year was awarded the position of a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine and spent a month in New York City. Many of the events that took place were used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. Furious at not being at an arranged meeting with the poet Dylan Thomas she waited around both the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel hoping to meet her poetic hero, but he was already on his journey home.
Just a few weeks later she slashed her legs to see if she had the courage to kill herself. It was during this time she was refused entry to a Harvard writing seminar. Plath underwent electroconvulsive therapy in 1953 for depression following which she made her first medically documented suicide attempt crawling under her house and taking her mother’s sleeping pills. She survived this first attempt and spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving insulin and electric shock treatments. Plath seemed to make a good recovery and returned to college. In early 1955 Plath submitted her thesis. The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky’s Novels. She graduated in June 1955 with the highest honours. Plath obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College where she continued writing poetry and publishing her work in Varsity, the student newspaper
Plath met the poet Ted Hughes in February 1956 and the couple married in the June of the same year. They honeymooned in Paris and Benidorm before Plath returned to Newnham in the October to begin her second year. During this time both she and Hughes become interested in astrology and the supernatural, using Ouija boards
Plath and Hughes moved to the USA in 1957 where Plath taught at Smith College. She found it difficult to combine teaching and writing and the couple moved to Boston in 1958 where Plath took a job as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital and spent evenings on creative writing seminars by the poet Robert Lowell with the writers Anne Sexton and George Starbuck
Encouraged to write from her experiences by both Lowell and Sexton, Plath openly discussed both her depression and suicide attempts from a female perspective and she began to see herself as a serious and focused poet and story writer. Plath and Hughes met the poet WS Merwin at this time who admired their work and became a lifelong friend. Working with Ruth Beuscher, Plath resumed psychoanalytic treatment.
Plath and Hughes travelled across Canada and the USA, and in late 1959 while staying at the Yaddo Artist Colony in Saratoga Springs Plath says she learnt ‘to be true to her own weirdness’. However, she remained anxious about confessional writing from her personal and private material. In December 1959, the couple returned to England and lived in London. Their daughter, Frieda, was born in April 1960. Plath published her first anthology of poems, ‘The Colossus,’ in October 1960.
In 1961 Plath suffered a miscarriage. The event was addressed in several of her poems including “Parliament Hill Fields “In August 1961 she completed her semi-autobiographical novel “The Bell Jar” and the family moved to Court Green, North Tawton, Devon. In January Plath gave birth to a son, Nicholas. From the mid-1960s Hughes began keeping bees, which formed the subject of many of Plath’s poems. The couple separated in 1962 due to Hughes having an affair.
Plath experienced a burst of creativity, beginning in October 1962, and wrote most of the poetry on which her reputation has been built, including 26 of the poems of her posthumously published collection “Ariel.” She returned, alone, to London in December 1962 with her children and took a five-year lease on a flat in Fitzroy Road.
The winter of 1962-63 was one of the coldest in 100 years; the pipes froze, and the children were often sick in a house with no telephone. Plath’s depression returned; however, she completed the poetry collection she was working on which would be published posthumously. Plath’s only novel “The Bell Jar” was published in January 1963 under the pen of Victoria Lucas and was met with critical indifference.
Plath tried several times to take her own life before her death. In August 1953 she overdosed on sleeping pills, then in June 1962 she drove her car off the side of the road into a river. Plath spoke to her GP John Horder describing the depressive episode she was experiencing. It had been ongoing for over 6 months. For most of the time she had continued working, but the depression was worsening and had become severe with constant agitation, suicidal ideologies, and an inability to cope with life.
Horder prescribed Plath an antidepressant a few days before her suicide. He visited her daily as she was at risk with two young children and also made strong efforts to have her admitted to a hospital as well as arranging a live-in nurse.
Resources
The Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath
The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.
There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.
The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.
I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.
The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.
Jezzie G 