Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously.

Born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, Plath graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then the University of Cambridge in England, where she was a Fulbright student at Newnham College. In 1959, Plath took a creative writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University, alongside poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Within this seminar, Plath, Lowell and Sexton, whilst starting with very different writing styles, each gravitated towards a new style of poetry dubbed confessional for its use of personal experience and its tendency to use a direct form of address. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 in London. In 1957, they briefly moved to the United States, but moved back to England in the winter of 1959.

Letters written by Plath to her therapist, Dr Ruth Barnhouse, reveal allegations that her husband was physically abusive. These unpublished letters, written between 1960 and 1963, additionally allege emotional abuse. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas, before separating in 1962.

Plath suffered a lifelong battle with severe depression, often characterized as a bipolar-type illness, leading to multiple traumatic treatments with early model electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). She died by suicide at age 30 in London on February 11, 1963.

Biography

Early life and education

Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath (1906–1994), was the American-born daughter of Austrian immigrants, and her father, Otto Plath (1885–1940), was from Grabow in Prussia, German Empire. Plath's father was an entomologist and a professor of biology at Boston University who wrote a book about bumblebees in 1934.

On April 27, 1935, Plath's brother Warren Joseph was born. Since 1920, Plath's maternal grandparents, the Schobers, had lived in a section of Winthrop called Point Shirley, a location mentioned in Plath's poetry.

Based on her poetry and journals, the power dynamic between Plath’s parents was characterized by a strict, patriarchal structure in which her father, Otto Plath, held absolute authority, while her mother, Aurelia Plath, was perceived as a subservient yet ultimately managing figure. Seen in Plath’s work, particularly “Daddy”, presents this dynamic as a source of deep emotional trauma where her father is viewed as an oppressive “god” and her mother as a passive figure.

Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940, a week and a half after his daughter's eighth birthday,

Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in the Boston Heralds children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. At age 11, Plath began keeping a journal. Just after graduating from high school, she had her first national publication in The Christian Science Monitor. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar.

She was furious at not being at a meeting that Mademoiselle editor Cyrilly Abels had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a writer whose work she loved, according to one of her boyfriends, "more than life itself". She loitered around the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs "to see if she had enough courage to kill herself." During this time, she was not accepted into a Harvard University writing seminar with author Frank O'Connor. by crawling under the front porch and taking her mother's sleeping pills.

She survived this first suicide attempt, later writing that she "blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion". She spent the next six months in psychiatric care, receiving more electric and insulin shock treatment under the care of Ruth Beuscher. According to Plath's biographer Andrew Wilson, Olive Higgins Prouty "would take Dr. Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide attempt".

She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she lived in Whitstead, a detached house situated on the edge of the college grounds. Plath continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard. She spent her first-year winter and spring holidays traveling around Europe. Plath describes how she met Hughes:

In 1977, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a collection of short stories, other prose writings and diary excerpts was published by Faber & Faber.<br />

In 2024, Faber published a new volume titled The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg, which contains nearly 217 mostly previously unpublished works written by Plath, such as fiction, nonfiction, texts from the Smith College Press Board, book reviews, and story fragments, and provides a better awareness and understanding of Plath's efforts in the various genres represented.

The Collected Poems, published in 1981, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, contained poetry written from 1956 until her death. Plath posthumously was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Letters and journals

Heavily abridged versions of Plath's letters to her family, mainly to her mother and brother, were published in 1975, edited and selected by her mother Aurelia Plath. The collection Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 came out partly in response to the strong public reaction to the publication of The Bell Jar in America.

In 2017 and 2018, two new volumes of letters, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940-1956 and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume II: 1956-1963, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, were published by Faber. With more than 2.500 pages, both volumes contain complete and unabridged letters to her family, friends, mentors and teachers, ex-boyfriends and to Ted Hughes.

Plath started writing in her diary on January 1, 1944, at the age of 11 and continued until her death by suicide in February 1963. Her early diaries remain unpublished and are currently at Indiana University Bloomington. Her adult diaries, starting from her first year at Smith College in 1950, were published in 1982 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough, with Ted Hughes as consulting editor. In 1982, when Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, the 50th anniversary of Plath's death.

During the 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 his children by Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil, who finished her editing in December 1999. In 2000 Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. More than half of the new volume contained newly released material; Hughes lost another journal and an unfinished novel, and instructed that a collection of Plath's papers and journals should not be released until 2013. He has been accused of attempting to control the estate for his own ends, although royalties from Plath's poetry were placed into a trust account for their two children, Frieda and Nicholas.

Plath's gravestone has been repeatedly vandalized by those aggrieved that "Hughes" is written on the stone; they have attempted to chisel it off, leaving only the name "Sylvia Plath". Plath and Hughes's daughter Frieda has condemned the defacement. When Hughes's mistress Assia Wevill died by suicide and killed their four-year-old daughter Shura in 1969, this practice intensified, as Wevill's death led to claims that Hughes had been abusive to both Plath and Wevill. Outraged mourners accused Hughes in the media of dishonoring Plath's name by removing the stone.

Radical feminist poet Robin Morgan published the poem "Arraignment", in which she openly accused Hughes of the battery and murder of Plath. Her book Monster (1972) "included a piece in which a gang of Plath aficionados are imagined castrating Hughes, stuffing his penis into his mouth and then blowing out his brains". Hughes threatened to sue Morgan. The book was withdrawn by the publisher Random House, but it remained in circulation among feminists. Other feminists threatened to kill Hughes in Plath's name and pursue a conviction for murder.

Still the subject of speculation and opprobrium in 1998, Hughes published Birthday Letters that year, his own collection of 88 poems about his relationship with Plath. Hughes had published very little about his experience of the marriage and Plath's suicide, and the book caused a sensation, being taken as his first explicit disclosure, and it topped bestseller charts. It was not known at the volume's release that Hughes had terminal cancer and would die later that year. The book won the Forward Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The poems, written after Plath's death, in some cases long after, try to find a reason why Plath killed herself.

In October 2015, the BBC Two documentary Ted Hughes: Stronger Than Death examined Hughes's life and work; it included audio recordings of Plath reciting her own poetry. Their daughter Frieda spoke for the first time about her mother and father.

Themes and legacy

Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what became her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, fetuses, and skulls. They were mostly imitation exercises of poets she admired such as Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats and Marianne Moore. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is filled with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the 40 poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests.

It was the posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965 that precipitated Plath's rise to fame and helped establish her reputation as one of the 20th century's best poets. As soon as it was published, critics began to see the collection as the charting of Plath's increasing desperation or death wish. Her dramatic death became her most famous aspect and remains so. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder."On January 16, 2004, The Independent in London published an article which ranked Ariel as the third best book of modern poetry among its Ten Best Modern Poetry Books.

Some in the feminist movement saw Plath as speaking for their experience, as a "symbol of blighted female genius".

Smith College, Plath's alma mater, holds her literary papers in the Smith College Library.

The United States Postal Service introduced a postage stamp featuring Plath in 2012. An English Heritage plaque records Plath's residence at 3 Chalcot Square, in London.

In 2018, The New York Times published an obituary for Plath as part of the Overlooked history project.

Portrayals in media

Plath's voice is heard in a BBC documentary about her life, recorded in London in late 1962. Of the BBC recording Elizabeth Hardwick wrote:

Letters Home is a 1986 experimental telefilm directed by Chantal Akerman in which Plath's letters to and from her mother are recited by Delphine Seyrig and Coralie Seyrig, with the latter taking on the role of Plath. It is an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play.

Gwyneth Paltrow portrayed Plath in the biopic Sylvia (2003). Elizabeth Sigmund, who was friends with both Plath and Hughes, criticized the movie for depicting Sylvia as "a permanent depressive and a possessive person", but she conceded that "the film has an atmosphere towards the end of her life which is heartbreaking in its accuracy". Frieda Hughes, who was only two years old when she lost her mother, was angered by the making of entertainment featuring her parents' troubled marriage and her mother's death. She accused the "peanut crunching" public of wanting to be titillated by her family's tragedies. In 2003, Frieda reacted to the situation in the poem "My Mother", first published in Tatler:

Musical settings

In his Ariel: Five Poems of Sylvia Plath (1971), American composer Ned Rorem has set for soprano, clarinet and piano the poems "Words", "Poppies In July", "The Hanging Man", "Poppies In October", and "Lady Lazarus."
Also drawing from Ariel, in his Six Poems by Sylvia Plath for solo soprano (1975), German composer Aribert Reimann has set the poems "Edge", "Sheep In Fog", "The Couriers", "The Night Dances", and "Words." He later set "Lady Lazarus" (1992), also for solo soprano.
Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's five-part From the Grammar of Dreams for soprano and mezzo a cappella (1988) is constructed on a collage of fragments from The Bell Jar and the poem "Paralytic." The piece was also arranged by the composer into a version for soprano and electronics (2002), in which the singer sings in interaction with a recorded double of her own voice. Albeit composed as a concert piece, From the Grammar of Dreams has also been staged.
American composer Juliana Hall's Lorelei (1989) for mezzo, horn, and piano is a setting of Plath's poem of the same name. Hall had previously set "The Night Dances" as a movement of her cycle for soprano and piano Night Dances (1987) featuring texts by five female poets, and went on to write a song cycle for soprano and piano entirely devoted to Plath, Crossing The Water (2011), which comprises the poems "Street Song", "Crossing The Water", "Rhyme", and "Alicante Lullaby."
In her cycle for soprano and piano The Blood Jet (2006), American composer Lori Laitman set the poems "Morning Song", "The Rival", "Kindness", and "Balloons."

Publication list

Poetry collections

The Colossus and Other Poems (1960, William Heinemann)
Ariel (1965, Faber & Faber)
Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968, Turret Books)
Crossing the Water (1971, Faber & Faber)
Winter Trees (1971, Faber & Faber)
The Collected Poems (1981, Faber & Faber)
Selected Poems (1985, Faber & Faber)
Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004, Faber & Faber)
The Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil (2026, Faber & Faber)

Collected prose and novels

The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" (novel, 1963, Heinemann)
Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975, Harper & Row, US; Faber & Faber, UK)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977, Faber & Faber)
The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (1982, Dial Press)
The Magic Mirror (1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000, Anchor Books)
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2017, Faber & Faber)
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil (2018, Faber & Faber)
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom (2019, Faber & Faber)
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg (2024, Faber & Faber)

Biography

Early life and education

Letters and journals

Themes and legacy

Portrayals in media

Musical settings

Publication list

Poetry collections

Collected prose and novels

Children's books

See also

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Further reading

External links