Sylvia Plath: American poet

Her early life

Sylvia Plath was born on 27^th October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was an expert on bees who had emigrated from what is now northern Germany at a young age. Her mother, Aurelia, was Austrian by ancestry. Otto’s death when Sylvia was only eight had a great effect on her.

She started writing poems and stories when very young, and was aged eight when her first poem appeared in print, although she was eighteen before she achieved success with a story. Early influences included Virginia Woolf, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. 

She left Bradford Senior High School in 1950 to enter Smith College as a scholarship student. While at Smith she wrote and published a huge amount of material and edited the Smith Review. 

In her third year at Smith she was offered a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine, which meant spending time in New York, but began to find the pressure of all her commitments becoming more than she could cope with. She first talked about being in a “bell jar” at this time.

Her first setback was being refused a place at the Harvard writing seminar in 1953, and this was a contributing factor to her mental breakdown that led to a suicide attempt (a sleeping pill overdose) in August of that year. She was lucky to survive, as she was not found for three days.

Cambridge and Ted Hughes

After treatments that included ECT (electro-convulsive therapy) she returned to Smith and graduated in 1955. She then became a Fulbright scholar and spent two years at Cambridge University where she met the British poet Ted Hughes. Their courtship was intense and rapid, and they were married in London in June 1956.

Poetically they were worlds apart, in that Hughes’s poetry was earthy and often violent, taking nature as his subject matter, whereas Plath wrote from feelings deep within herself.  

Following a honeymoon in Spain they returned to Cambridge, and for a short time were very happy together. However, tensions were soon apparent in both her marriage and her poetry, the latter of which was undergoing changes as she began to write with greater passion and a more conversational tone.

America and depression

In 1957 she was appointed to a teaching post at Smith College, but she found this to be very hard and unfulfilling work that made it difficult for her to write. She became severely depressed and underwent psychoanalysis. Her poems at this period reveal her confused state of mind, especially over her feelings towards her husband, mother, and dead father. 

Early in 1969 she attended a seminar at Boston University headed by Robert Lowell, and at which she also met Anne Sexton. Both poets proved to be very influential for her, although she wrote more fiction than poetry at this time.

After Plath and Hughes drove across America and back that summer, she found a new creative urge and completed her first published collection, “The Colossus”. This proved to be one of the most productive periods of her poetic career, coinciding with her first pregnancy.

Back to Britain

They moved back to the UK early in 1960, and Sylvia gave birth to Frieda in April while they were living in a small London flat. Both Sylvia and Ted enjoyed success with their work, although Sylvia suffered a miscarriage in February 1961. In August they moved to the Devon countryside, where their second child, Nicholas, was born in January 1962.

Sylvia began again to be haunted by the memory of the father she had only known as a child, and this was reinforced when they started to keep bees, which had been the expertise of her father. Her poetry at this stage had become darker, with images of drowning and violence becoming more prominent.

Their marriage broke down later in 1962, after Ted had begun an affair, and they agreed to separate in September. The poems she wrote at this time are full of pain and a sense of betrayal.

She stayed in Devon with the two children, finishing “The Bell Jar”, which was in effect her autobiography, as well as a fluent outpouring of intensely felt poems that would later be collected as “Ariel”. 

Suicide

This fluency continued when she moved back to London in December, with her output sometimes reaching three completed poems a day, despite her increasing depression. Her mood was not improved by this being one of the coldest winters on record in England, and both the children were ill with flu, as she was herself. Some of her poems reflect the bleakness of the weather and her mood, but others appear to look forward to Spring and better things.

However, early on 11^th February she took biscuits and milk to her sleeping children, sealed the door of their bedroom carefully behind her, and gassed herself in the kitchen. 

“Ariel” was published in 1965, but the volume was edited by Ted Hughes in ways that would certainly not have been to Sylvia’s liking, including the omission of some poems that were critical of him. 

Her legacy

The appearance of later collections and appreciations of Plath’s work have led to many conflicting views as to her poetic legacy and the motivations behind her life and work. Had she been able to present her work to the world in the way that she would have wanted, the “Sylvia Plath myth” might well have been different. It is not fair to her reputation, for example, to see her whole output as one long slide towards depression and suicide. 

Sylvia Plath has also been seen by some as a feminist icon, and Ted Hughes was roundly condemned in some quarters as being largely responsible for her death. It is certainly true that she was hugely influential as a woman poet, and her appeal is probably greatest amongst young women readers. However, it is a distortion to regard her as a warrior in the war of woman against man. Her work as a poet must stand up for itself, and this it does as the testament of a woman with a deeply complex psyche who had a true poetic gift in expressing her being in words.

© John Welford