Sylvia Plath
Sylvia was born to middle class parents in Massachusetts, and she published her first book when she was eight. She was compelled toward perfection, popular in school, getting all A's, and winning the best prizes.By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at college wrote over 400 poems. But Sylvia's surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father when she was eight. During the summer after her junior year at college, she returned from a stay in New York where she was a guest editor for Mademoiselle Magazine. That summer she nearly succeeded in commiting suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She wrote about her expierence in her book, "The Bell Jar", published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy, Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith in 1955 and winning a scholarship to Cambridge. In 1956 she married the English Poet Ted Hughes, and in 1960, when she was 28, her first book was published; "The Colossus". The poems in the book give only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she would begin writing in 1961. After less than two years with her husband, and after the birth of their child, their marrage broke up. The winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Sylvia living in a small London flat, now with two children, ill with the flu and low on money. The difficulty of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between 4 and 8 in the morning, before the children woke, often finishing a poem a day. In her last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile. On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the afe of 30. Two years later her book "Ariel" was published, a collection of some of her later works, followed by "Crossing the Water and Winter Trees". |
| Online Directory of Sylvia's Poems |
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