Sylvia Plath
- For other uses, see Sylvia Plath (disambiguation).
| Sylvia Plath |
|---|
Cover of Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life by Linda Wagner-Martin
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| Born |
| October 27, 1932 Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts |
| Died |
| February 11, 1963 London |
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 clinical depression. Plath and Anne Sexton are credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry that Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass initiated. Since her suicide, Sylvia Plath has risen to iconic status and is considered to be one of the best poets of her generation.
Life
Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, a section of Boston, Massachusetts. Born to a German father and an ethnic German Austrian-American mother, Plath showed early promise, publishing her first poem at the age of 8. She attended Wellesley High School. Her father, Otto, a college professor and noted authority on the subject of bees, died of an embolism following surgery (complications from undiagnosed diabetes) on November 5, 1940. It is thought that Plath never fully recovered from the loss of her father. She continued to try to publish poems, and in August of 1950, her first short story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again" appeared in Seventeen magazine.
Sylvia suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life. She had entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but in the summer of 1953, after her return from a guest editorship at Madamoiselle magazine in New York, she experienced a severe episode of depression and was treated with a regimen of electro-convulsive shock therapy (ECT) and, subsequently, at the beginning of her junior year, on August 24, 1953, she made the first of her suicide attempts. She was committed to a mental institution (McLean Hospital), and seemed to make an acceptable recovery, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955, the same year she won the prestigious Glascock Prize competition for her poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea." She later depicted her breakdown in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.
Plath earned a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where she continued writing poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Cambridge she met English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956 (Bloomsday) with Plath's mother in attendance. Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the United States. Plath taught at Smith. They then moved to Boston where Plath sat in on seminars with Robert Lowell. This course was to have a profound influence on her work. Plath also met poet Anne Sexton during these seminars and became friends with her. At this time Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin, who admired their work and remained a lifelong friend. On discovering that Plath was pregnant, they moved back to the United Kingdom. Frieda Hughes was born on April 1, 1960.
She and Hughes lived in London for a while before settling in Court Green, North Tawton, a small market town in Mid Devonshire. She published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, in the United Kingdom in 1960. In February 1961, she suffered a miscarriage. A number of poems refer to this event. The marriage met with difficulties and they were separated less than two years after the birth of their first child, Frieda. Their separation was partly due to her mental illness, which was exacerbated by the affair that Hughes had with a fellow poet's wife, Assia Wevill. The nature of her illness remains the subject of much speculation. Theories range from bipolar disorder (manic-depressive syndrome) to schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Plath returned to London with their children, Frieda and Nicholas. She rented a flat in Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill (near Regent's Park), in a house where W. B. Yeats once lived; Plath was extremely pleased with this and considered it a good omen. However, the winter of 1962/1963 was very harsh. Finding herself unable to cope, she rang her friend Jillian Becker and spent the last weekend of her life at the Becker household. The Becker home was warm and comfortable and equipped for children, the Beckers having three girls, the youngest a baby of about Nick's age. She appears to have been happy that weekend, and resolved to return home on the Sunday. On February 11, 1963, Plath gassed herself in her kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty. The new nanny arrived but couldn't rouse Plath's neighbor in the flat below, as he was under the effect of the gas. Plath's children were found in good health, if a bit chilled—she had taken the precautions of opening the windows in the other rooms and sealing the kitchen door crack with dish towels.
Plath is buried in the churchyard at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Rumours of her poverty in the last year of her life have been disputed by later books, particularly Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame. The neutrality of this biography is disputed, and it remains difficult to obtain an objective account of the relationship between Plath and Hughes.
Works
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 disputed. In letters to Aurelia Plath and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she was applying for a divorce. However, Hughes has said in a letter to The Guardian that Plath did not seriously consider divorce, and claims they were talking about a future together right up until her death.
Sylvia Plath began keeping a diary at the age of 11 and kept journals until her suicide in February 1963. Hughes faced criticism for his role in handling the journals: he destroyed Plath's last journal, which contains entries from the winter of 1962 up to her death. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshmen 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 his 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 Freida 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.
In 1982, Plath became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously (for The Collected Poems).
Many critics accused Hughes of attempting to control the publications for his own ends, although he denied this. Examples usually cited are his censoring of parts of her Journals, and his editing of Ariel. This editing involved removing several poems, and rearranging the order in which the works appeared. Some critics have argued 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. He also cut a deal with Plath's mother Aurelia when she tried to block publication of her daughter's more controversial works in the United States. In his last collection, Birthday Letters, Hughes broke his silence about Plath. The cover artwork was done by Frieda.
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 extent of Hughes' influence has been a topic of great debate. Plath's poems are in her own voice and the similarities between the two poets' works are slight.
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 frank descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as Daddy. Plath has also been heavily criticised for her controversial allusions to The Holocaust, and is known for her shocking use of metaphor. Plath's work has been associated with Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets. 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. An indication of the level of bitterness that some people have directed at Hughes can be seen in the history of people chiseling the word Hughes off her gravestone. Her headstone has subsequently been rendered more 'tamper proof.'
Bibliography
Poetry
- The Colossus (1960)
- Ariel (1965)
- Crossing the Water (1971)
- Winter Trees (1972)
- The Collected Poems (1981)
- Daddy
Prose
- The Bell Jar (1963) under the pseudonym 'Victoria Lucas'
- 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)
Children's
- 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.
Biography
- Sylvia Plath (2004, Chelsea House, Great Writers Series) by Peter K. Steinberg | ISBN 0791078434
Other references
- The 2003 film, Sylvia, tells the story of the troubled relationship of the poet couple.
- Hayman, Ronald [1991] The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath London, Melbourne, Auckland Heinemann
- Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, by Erica Wagner.
- Linda Wagner-Martin "Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life". London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.
- Jillian Becker: Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. The friend with whom Plath spent the last weekend of her life recalls their friendship. Ferrington, London 2002
- "Sylvia Plath" by Ryan Adams from the record "Gold" 2001
- "Crackle & Drag" by Paul Westerberg from the 2003 album "Come Feel Me Tremble"
External links
- www.sylviaplath.info
- Literary Encyclopedia biography
- Biography
- Sylvia Plath on Poets.org Biography, poems, related essays and links from the Academy of American Poets
- Sylvia Plath Forum
- Sylvia Plath at Neurotic Poets
- Sylvia Plath's Gravesite
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