Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath the American poet, novelist and short-story writer (1932-1963) whose work, rooted in a febrile and rigorous intelligence, transformed confessional poetry and whose novel The Bell Jar and posthumous collection Ariel secured her posthumous fame.

Early Life and Education

Sylvia Plath was born on 27 October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Otto Plath, a German-born professor of biology, and Aurelia Schober Plath, a teacher. The family lived in the coastal town of Winthrop, and her childhood by the sea is reflected in much of her imagery. Her father died in 1940, when she was eight, an event that haunted her poetry throughout her life.

She was a brilliant and ferociously ambitious student. She published her first poem while still in her teens, won prizes for her writing, and attended Smith College, a leading women's college, on a scholarship. In 1953 she was selected as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York, an experience that aggravated the pressures she felt and that led to a severe breakdown and a suicide attempt that summer.

Her account of that period became the material of her novel and of some of her poetry. After recovering, she returned to Smith and graduated in 1955 with the highest honours, and she went on to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, on a Fulbright fellowship, taking a master's degree in 1957. Her academic record was outstanding, and her poems and stories appeared in national magazines.

Marriage and the Writing of The Bell Jar

At Cambridge she met the English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. The two poets lived first in the United States, where she taught at Smith College, and then in London and in the Devon countryside. Their marriage was intense and productive, and both wrote a great deal during these years, but it was also troubled, and in 1962 it broke down after Hughes began an affair.

She published her first collection, The Colossus, in 1960, a volume of carefully wrought poems influenced by her studies and by the example of earlier poets. It showed a technical mastery and a distinctive voice, but it was her later work, written at great speed in the last months of her life, that would change the course of her reputation.

Her novel The Bell Jar appeared in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman who wins a magazine internship in New York, begins to collapse under the pressure of expectation, and descends into depression and a suicide attempt. The book gives a mordant account of the conflicting demands placed on ambitious young women of the period, and it has become a central text of American coming-of-age fiction.

Ariel and the Confessional Mode

In the last months of her life Plath wrote many of the poems that would be collected in Ariel, published posthumously in 1965. Poems such as Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Tulips and the title poem are written in a controlled yet ferocious voice, and they draw on personal experience, myth and history to confront grief, rage, the memory of her father and the condition of women.

The Ariel poems marked a new departure. Their imagery is stark and immediate, their rhythms incantatory, and their tone by turns defiant, sardonic and tender. Plath took the confessional mode pioneered by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton and pushed it further, combining extreme personal exposure with a formidable command of form and of the literary tradition.

The poems are short and compressed, but they carry the weight of an entire inner life. Critics have debated the relations between the poetry and the poet's biography, and there is no doubt that her death has shaped the reception of the work. Yet the poems themselves, with their technical brilliance and their unflinching intensity, are what established her as a major poet.

Death and the Reception of Her Work

In the winter of 1962 and 1963 Plath was living in London with her two young children, struggling with illness and the aftermath of the collapse of her marriage. She died by suicide on 11 February 1963, at the age of thirty. Her death, following so soon after the publication of The Bell Jar, gave a tragic cast to her writing that has never entirely faded.

The publication of Ariel and of later collections, including Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, revealed the scope of her late achievement. The Bell Jar was reissued under her own name in 1967 and became widely read. Her Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, the first such award given posthumously to a poet.

Her reputation has continued to grow. She is studied in schools and universities, and her work has influenced many poets. Her life has been the subject of biographies and films, and often the story of her marriage has threatened to overshadow the writing. But her poems and her novel have proved durable, and she is now regarded as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century.

Themes and Legacy

Plath's central subjects are the self and its dissolution, the relations between men and women, the experience of motherhood, and the confrontation with death. Her obsession with her father, her rage and grief, and her ambivalence toward the roles available to women of her generation give her work an emotional force that readers find both disturbing and liberating. She wrote about the unspeakable in a language of great beauty.

She is associated with confessional poetry, and with the wider movement in mid-century American writing toward direct personal statement. Yet her mastery of form, her allusive use of myth, folklore and history, and her sense of the poetic tradition distinguish her from the merely autobiographical. Her images, drawn from medicine, religion and the natural world, are constructed with the precision of a craftsman.

She has become an emblematic figure for many readers, a woman artist who achieved great things in adverse conditions and whose work continues to speak to questions of identity, mental illness and the cost of creative ambition. Her influence on later poets is substantial, and the controversies that still gather around her life have only increased the attention paid to her writing. She is remembered as a poet of extraordinary gifts whose brief career left a permanent mark on modern literature.

See also

• The Bell Jar
• Ariel
• Confessional poetry
• Ted Hughes