Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (born October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died February 11, 1963, London, England) was an American poet and novelist whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America. The searing use of language and shocking honesty in her works helped make her a major figure in both the confessional poetry movement and the literature of the women’s movement beginning in the 1960s. Plath continues to be an influence on many 21st-century writers.

Family background

Plath was the oldest of two children born to Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober Plath. Her father was a German-born professor who had a stern demeanor and had been investigated by the FBI during World War I for alleged pro-German sympathies. He met Aurelia Schober—more than 20 years his junior and the daughter of Austrian immigrants—when she was a graduate student at Boston University, where he was her German instructor. Their marriage was not a happy one, mostly because of Otto’s authoritarian nature. He died in 1940, when Sylvia Plath was eight years old. Aurelia Plath subsequently supported the family as an instructor and, later, associate professor in the medical secretarial program at Boston University. For the rest of her life, she was a staunch supporter of her famous daughter’s writing.

Early literary achievements, education, and marriage to Ted Hughes

Sylvia Plath published her first poem at age eight. She entered and won many literary contests, and, while still in high school, she sold her first poem to The Christian Science Monitor and her first short story to Seventeen magazine. She entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1951 and was a cowinner of the Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest in 1952. At Smith Plath achieved considerable artistic, academic, and social success, but she also suffered from severe depression, attempted suicide, and underwent a period of psychiatric hospitalization. She graduated from Smith with highest honors in 1955 and went on to Newnham College in Cambridge, England, on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1956 she met and married the English poet Ted Hughes, who had also been a student at Cambridge. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962, after Hughes’s affair with another woman.

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The Colossus and The Bell Jar

During 1957–58 Plath was an instructor in English at Smith College. In 1960, shortly after she returned to England with Hughes, her first collection of poems appeared as The Colossus, which received good reviews. Her novel, The Bell Jar, was published in London in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Strongly autobiographical, the book describes the mental health crisis and eventual recovery of a young college girl and parallels Plath’s own experiences in 1953. For further discussion, see The Bell Jar.

Final years and death

During her last three years Plath abandoned the restraints and conventions that had bound much of her early work. She wrote with great speed, producing poems of stark self-revelation and confession in the final five months of her life. The anxiety, confusion, and doubt that haunted her were transmuted into verses of great power and pathos borne on flashes of incisive wit and irony. Her poem “Daddy” and several others explore her conflicted relationship with her father and her volatile relationship with Hughes. In a letter that she wrote to her mother in the fall of 1962 Plath recognized the potency of these poems, remarking, “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.” In February 1963, after this burst of productivity, she took her own life.

Ariel

Ariel (1965)—a posthumously published collection of Plath’s later poems that includes “Daddy” and another of her well-known poems, “Lady Lazarus”—sparked the growth of a much broader following of devoted and enthusiastic readers than she had during her lifetime. Ariel received a review in The New York Times that praised its “relentless honesty,” “sophistication of the use of rhyme,” and “bitter force,” and Poetry magazine noted “a pervasive impatience, a positive urgency to the poems.”

As with many of Plath’s posthumous publications, Ariel was compiled by Hughes, who became the executor of her estate. However, controversy surrounded both the estate’s management of her work’s copyright and his editing practices, especially when he revealed that he had altered Plath’s original poetic sequence and removed several poems from her manuscript.

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In 2004 a restored edition was released, featuring a foreword by Plath’s and Hughes’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, who wrote that her mother’s manuscript “was clearly geared to cover the ground from just before the breakup of the marriage to the resolution of a new life, with all the agonies and furies in between.” A significant difference between the two versions is that Plath’s sequence had ended with a series of “bee poems” that focus on the themes of spring and resurrection, unlike the stark, death-centric poems that Hughes selected as the collection’s closing pieces. For further discussion, see Ariel.

Other works

With Ariel, Plath quickly became one of the most popular American poets. The appearance of small collections of previously unpublished poems, including Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1971), was welcomed by critics and the public alike. The latter collection features 18 poems that Plath wrote near the end of her life, including several that Hughes omitted from Ariel. It also contains Three Women, a radio play in verse that Plath wrote in 1962. The Bell Jar was reissued in Great Britain under her own name in 1966, and it was published in the United States for the first time in 1971. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a book of short stories and prose, was published in 1977.

The Collected Poems, which was edited by Hughes and includes many previously unpublished poems, appeared in 1981 and received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, making Plath the first to receive the honor posthumously. She had kept a journal for much of her life, and in 1982 The Journals of Sylvia Plath was published. In the foreword Hughes revealed that he had destroyed a journal covering the final days of her life immediately after her death. As with his changes to Ariel, his actions, which he explained he had taken to protect their children, were the subject of much vilification by fans and scholars of Plath’s work. A book for children that she had written in 1959, The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, was published in 1996.

Interest in Plath and her works continued into the 21st century. In 2000 The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, covering the years from 1950 to 1962, was published. A biographical film of Plath starring Gwyneth Paltrow (Sylvia) appeared in 2003. In 2009 Plath’s radio play Three Women was staged professionally for the first time. A volume of Plath’s letters, written in 1940–56, was published in 2017. A second collection—which contained her later letters, including a number of candid notes to her psychiatrist that alleged abuse by Hughes—appeared the following year. In 2019 the story Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom, written in 1952, was published for the first time.

Legacy

With Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, Plath is one of the leading figures of confessional poetry, a mid-20th-century movement that remains resonant in the 21st century. As the women’s movement gained force in the late 1960s and ’70s, Plath was the first contemporary female voice to whom many other women were exposed. In a 2018 interview between former U.S. poets laureate Rita Dove and Tracy K. Smith, Dove said, “It wasn’t until a professor of mine in a creative writing class actually introduced us to Sylvia Plath that I heard a female voice, a contemporary female voice, who was unabashedly using things or situations that had not really appeared in poetry, such as a child, and looking at the child as a mother, or nursery rhymes.”

At the same time, some critics have objected to the lingering fascination with Plath’s death and her experience of mental anguish. In his book Reading America (1987) Irish literary critic Denis Donoghue wrote, “It is not an insult to Plath to say that her death was widely used to serve a wretched rhetorical purpose. It was already volubly assumed that the only valid experience was an experience of the abyss: risk was suffused with an aura entirely heroic.…Suicide was the sign of authenticity. Sanity was supposed to feel ashamed of itself.”

Similarly, American poet Maggie Nelson noted in her book The Art of Cruelty (2011) that Plath, like other female artists such as photographer Diane Arbus, had been reduced to a “fearless renegade/narcissistic exploiter dyad.” Nelson added, “Lest we forget, to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.”

Nevertheless, Plath looms large in contemporary culture, as readily referenced in pop songs and television sitcoms as she is cited as an influence by modern poets and writers such as Smith, Sharon Olds, Lena Dunham, Jericho Brown, and Jennifer Egan.