Biography
Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts on October 1932 to Aurelia and Otto Plath. Her mother was of Austrian descent, and twenty-one years younger than her father, while her father was from Germany. Her father was a professor of German and zoology and a bee specialist. Sylvia Plath has also written a number of bee poems. Plath was raised a Unitarian Christian, however she was not comfortable with her religion throughout her life. She published her first poem at the young age of eight in the Boston Herald’s children section. The death of her father also inspired Plath to write the poem “Daddy,” still attracting readers to Otto Plath’s gravestone to this day.
In her junior year at Smith College, Plath made her first documented suicide attempt. She crawled under her house and took an overdose of sleeping pills. She was later committed to a mental institute briefly and recovered there. At a party given at Cambridge, to which she had received the Fullbright scholarship, Plath met her future husband Ted Hughes, an English poet. They were married on June 16 th, 1965 after a short courtship. Plath had also kept journals since she was eleven, till her death. Her diaries revealed a strong hatred for her mother. However it is controversial that her husband destroyed her final journal after her death containing details of their last few months together.
Plath was completely enamored with Ted Hughes. They lived in the United States for two years, and later moved to England once Plath was pregnant. There, she published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. However, Plath suffered a miscarriage, an event that was reflected in many of her poems. She had two children with Hughes, Frieda and Nicholas. Upon learning of Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath was devastated and the couple separated. She began imagining fantasies of self-destruction.
Plath committed suicide on Feburary 11 th, 1963, at the age of 31. She had placed her head in the oven while the gas was turned on. Her gravestone bears the inscription “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.” Interestingly, Assia Wevill also murdered herself in a similar manner as Sylvia Plath, using gas.
Sylvia Plath is known as a confessional and American poet, and has been widely criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust. Many of her poems reflect her personal struggles. “Tulips”, “Daddy,” and “Lady Lazarus” all contain descriptions of mental illness (Source G). Her best-known poems are noted for their intense focus and personal imagery. Her posthumous “Ariel” (1965) has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry published in England and America in the 20th century, knocking the literary world off of their feet. She also was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize for “the Collected Poems,” in 1982. Plath also wrote an autobiographical novel, a month before her death, “The Bell Jar,” in which she used a pyseudonym, Victoria Lucas. It contained many of her personal memories and has an extremely feminist perspective, a classic of adolescent angst. (Source E)
"Mirror" by Sylvia Plath
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