Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Biography and Creativity

By the time she took her own life on February 11, 1963, the poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist Sylvia Plath was known in England (for the most part, Americans had not heard of Plath until her death) as an exceptionally gifted writer and champion of the feminine cause. Her poetry, fiction, and prose had earned her a reputation as a skillful artist capable of honing her craft, and she was especially seen as a gifted young poet of great potential. Yet, her personal life had become a nightmare, one that both inspired her to create poems with amazing alacrity and had taken her to utter despair.

Unlike the American myth of success in which people ascend into greatness, knowing health and wealth and fame, Sylvia’s is a tragic story imbued with mythology, the tale of an inimitable artist who suffered greatly. Although her life was filled with accomplishments, her works, especially her late and best-known works such as “Ariel,” “Daddy,” and “Lady Lazarus,” are most often viewed from the perspective of her death. In fact, much Plath criticism deals with the impact of her mental illness on her work and on the relationship between her life and her works. Critics are now reassessing her work from perspectives not tied to her psychological disposition and suicide. What remains clear is that Plath’s works deal with transformation, the power to confront pain, to reimagine the unimaginable, to create art out of experience, and to enter life again.

Born in Boston on October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath was the first child of Otto Emil Plath, a German- born immigrant, bee expert, and Boston University professor, and Aurelia Schober Plath, a teacher 21 years younger than her husband (the two met when Aurelia registered to take a German course Otto was teaching; Otto was married although estranged from his wife at the time). Two and a half years later, after the birth of her brother, Warren, the family moved to Aurelia’s hometown, Winthrop Bay, Massachusetts, just east of Boston, where the young Sylvia’s imagination was fed by the sounds, beauty, and power of the sea, the inspiration for many of the rhythms and images found in her poems.

After developing gangrene, having his leg amputated, contracting pneumonia, and suffering an embolism, the result of undiagnosed diabetes, Otto Plath died in 1940, leaving his wife with two young children and little money. Otto’s death haunted Sylvia, who at the impressionable age of eight watched as someone she loved died after a long, painful illness. Before his illness, her father had been a strong man, one whose scholarly endeavors determined how the house and family schedule were structured.

Thus, Sylvia felt his absence intensely and remarked to her mother that she would never speak to God again after her father’s death. Two years later Aurelia moved with her children and her parents to Wellesley, Massachusetts, to teach medical secretarial courses. Although her mother did her best to provide her children with the finest education possible, Sylvia’s early years were marked by insecurities about money and social status, an anxious sense of self-doubt she masked as both a child and adult but that had a profound influence on both her writing and personality.

Writing voraciously in journals at a young age, a practice she continued throughout her life, Sylvia led a productive life, impressing many with her talent as both an artist and a writer. By the time she graduated from high school, Sylvia had published poems in newspapers and written more than 50 stories, one of which, “Summer Will Not Come Again,” appeared in Seventeen magazine (August 1950). The recipient of the Olive Higgins Prouty Fund scholarship, Plath attended Smith College, a competitive school with a long reputation of academic excellence.

Although she felt enormous pressure and lived with a plaguing sense of self-doubt, Sylvia performed well, distinguishing herself socially and academically, writing for the school newspaper and journal, and serving in various leadership positions, including editor of the Smith Review, correspondent to the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and a guest editorship at Mademoiselle, for which she interviewed famous writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, Richard Wilbur, and George Steiner. After three hard years of pushing herself, Plath suffered a mental breakdown, for which she underwent hospitalization, psychiatric treatment, and electric shock therapy, all paid for by her Smith sponsor, Olive Higgins Prouty. By all accounts the treatment was successful; Plath returned to Smith in the winter of 1953-54 and graduated on June 6, 1955, summa cum laude.

After receiving a Fulbright Scholarship, Plath attended Newnham College in Cambridge, England, one of two women’s colleges dating from the Victorian period. In Cambridge she met Edward James Hughes (a gifted, rising poet known as “Ted Hughes”); they were married in London in June 1956. In 1957 the couple returned to the United States and lived in Northampton, where Plath taught at Smith for a year. Despite her success and popularity, Plath felt inadequate as a teacher, overwhelmed by the demands of teaching and unable to dedicate the time she needed to writing.

The couple then stayed in Boston for a year. In spring 1959 Plath attended Yaddo, a writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Next, the couple made a cross-country camping trip before returning to England. When they arrived, Plath was two months pregnant. Their first child, Frieda Rebecca, was born at home with the help of a midwife in London on April 1, 1960.

Sylvia’s first book, The Colossus and Other Poems, whose title poem dealt with her relationship with her father, was published in England in October 1960 and in the United States in 1962. The poems in Colossus date from the 1950s, including her time at Yaddo, when her style began to change dramatically. From 1956 Plath sought a publisher for the poems, all the while editing, reworking, and altering them, as well as adding new ones. Some critics, viewing Colossus in light of her late poems, often see Plath’s first published collection as belonging to a period of apprenticeship, one in which she often wrote poems as exercises, composing deliberately; experimenting with meter, sound, and rhyme; and working, at least according to Hughes, “very slowly with an open Thesaurus on her knee” (Orr 170).

Yet, as Pamela Smith, in “Architectonics: Sylvia Plath’s Colossus,” argues, “The Colossus emerges as something more significant than a poet’s workbook, more than some literary equivalent of the Hanon exercises of piano” (Butscher, Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work 113). Similarly, Linda Wagner-Martin, in Sylvia Plath: A Biography, argues:

Ted Hughes and others—Plath’s college roommates among them—have given us the familiar image of Sylvia writing poems, sitting with the heavy, red-covered thesaurus that was her father’s open on her lap, consulting it frequently. But as early as 1956, even before she had met Hughes, Sylvia had begun trying to write poems that spoke more colloquially. She had come to think of the poet as song-maker, not as scholar with her head buried in books. (166)

Thus, the late Colossus poems shift in diction, rhythm, and sound, defying previous conventions. By the close of the decade Plath’s poetry was informed by oral conventions and relying on comparatively low diction: This immediate language without the poetic distance of her previous work cannot be classified as “apprenticeship” work or mere exercises. In fact, by the March 18, 1961, composition of “Tulips,” Plath’s method had radically changed. She now wrote quickly, urgently, transforming the act of composition into an ecstatic experience, entering the personae she created and infusing them with an intensity not known previously.

As Steven Gold Axelrod in “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath” describes, most of the Colossus poems are from what he calls a “second stage” of her development, “a period of growth and experiment” (Gill 76). As Axelrod further notes, this poetry “has not received the attention it deserves.” Crossing the Water, published posthumously in 1971, also contains poems written around the time that Colossus was published. Jo Gill, in “The Colossus and Crossing the Water” maintains that, rather than the work of an apprentice, the poems in both collections contain “multiple voices, personae and perspectives at play . . . sometimes contradictory, often indeterminate,” poems that “merit attention: their allusiveness and elusiveness, their variety and range, their complexity and above all their sophisticated self-reflexivity” (Gill 104).

On February 6, 1961, Plath had a miscarriage, an experience she chronicled in “Parliament Hill Fields” (February 11, 1961), in which the poem’s speaker, walking alone, mourns her loss: “Your absence is inconspicuous; / Nobody can tell what I lack.” Later that month she underwent an appendectomy, which provided the inspiration for “Tulips” and “In Plaster.” During 1961 she wrote The Bell Jar about her experiences from 1953 (the novel was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas one month before her death): the guest editorship at a woman’s magazine, the bout with depression, and the failed suicide attempt. As early as June 13, 1959, Plath wrote in her journal: “Read COSMOPOLITAN from cover to cover. Two mental-health articles. I must write one about a college girl suicide. THE DAY I DIED. And a story, a novel even” (Unabridged Journals 495).

Thus, she had been thinking about the novel and about revisiting the time of her breakdown for several years. In the same year Plath and Hughes traveled southwest of London to Devon, where, enthralled with a thatch-roofed house that had been a former rectory, they decided to relocate to “Court Greene”—a manor home with nine rooms, horse stables, a tennis court, three acres of land, and an apple orchard. Although Plath and Hughes had to spend a great deal of time fixing up the house, Court Greene afforded them both with an ideal writing environment, Plath enjoying a second- floor study with a view of the front lawn, a wall separating the property from the adjacent church, and two trees that appear in her poetry: a yew tree and a giant wychelm.

On January 17, 1962, Plath gave birth to a son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes. She was becoming known in London literary circles as a poet; in June 1962 she recorded some of her poems and provided commentary on them for the BBC Living Poet series. She wrote The Women, a radio play for the BBC. During this frantic year, Ted had an extramarital affair, the couple separated, Ted moved out of the Devon house, and Sylvia and the children moved to London to a house once occupied by William Butler Yeats.

In the five months preceding her death on February 11, 1963, Plath wrote most of the poems collected posthumously as Ariel, at times as many as two or three a day. According to Hughes, Plath had selected and ordered the Ariel poems in a binder so that the collection opened with the word love, which opens the poem “Morning Song,” and concluded with the word spring, the final word of the poem “Wintering.”

Omitting 12 poems that dealt with what Hughes felt were inappropriate, hurtful, and overly personal subjects—many dealing with Plath’s anger over his extramarital affair—Hughes edited the first edition of Ariel, which appeared on March 11, 1965. So many copies were sold that the collection immediately needed to be reprinted. It was not until 1981 that Hughes, in the notes section of Plath’s Collected Poems, revealed that his ordering of the Ariel poems differed from Plath’s intentions.

The reader learns this from a simple statement Hughes makes in the introduction, which refers to page 295 of the text on which Plath’s intended ordering appears. In the introduction Hughes downplayed the heavy-handed editing he did: “The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from the one she planned. . . . It omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962.” Critics have taken Hughes to task for this decision; many feminist readings of Plath’s poems were inspired by Hughes’s omissions and admissions.

The Ariel poems attest to the growing sense of isolation and desperation Plath felt. Violent, direct, and often fixated with self-annihilation, these poems are shockingly truthful, as in “A Birthday Present”: “And the knife not carve, but enter / Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, / And the universe slide from my side” and in the famous line from “Lady Lazarus”: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well” and in the images of mutilation that occur in “Daddy,” the speaker confesses: “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know,” lines that, although they are from a persona Plath has created, nevertheless have poignant autobiographical correspondences and speak of a liberation that will only occur through murderous violence.

As the executor of Plath’s estate, Hughes has overseen not only her personal effects but also the publication of her prose, fiction, letters, journals, and poetry, the body of work that we know. Hughes’s role has been questioned because no one is sure whether Plath had filed for divorce before her death. Had she petitioned for divorce, Hughes’s inheritance would have been disputed. In letters to her mother and Richard Murphy, Plath writes that she is applying for a divorce. However, Hughes has maintained that the separation was not permanent and that the couple continued to talk about a future together. In 1982, when Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems appeared in print, Plath received a Pulitzer Prize, the fourth author at the time to have been awarded the prize posthumously (Amy Lowell, Stephen Vincent Benet, and William Carlos Williams died before their awards were given in 1926, 1944, and 1963, respectively).

Plath began keeping a diary at the age of 11 and kept journals until her suicide in February 1963. In the journals, Hughes has also faced criticism for his role in handling them: Plath’s last journal, which contains entries from winter 1962 up to her death, was destroyed by Hughes. Her adult diaries, starting from her freshman year at Smith College in 1950, were first published in 1980 as The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Frances McCullough. In 1982, when Smith College acquired all of Plath’s remaining journals, Hughes sealed two of them until February 11, 2013, marking the 50th anniversary of her death. In 1998, shortly before his death, he unsealed the two journals and left the project to Freida and Nicholas, who passed it on to Karen V. Kukil. After Kukil finished her edits in December 1999, Anchor Books published The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath in 2000.

Hughes was poet laureate of England from 1984 until his death on October 28, 1998. In 1998 he published Birthday Letters, a collection of poems he had written over the years reflecting on his courtship, marriage, and life with Plath and of his life after her death. A number of the Birthday Letters poems were published previously in Hughes’s New Selected Poems, 1957-1994. These works remain contentious; many critics question Hughes’s intent and find the collection troubling. Nevertheless, this collection along with The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) and Ariel: The Restored Edition—A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (2004) with a foreword by Frieda Hughes have created new interest in Plath’s works, which continue to be read and studied by the general public and academicians alike.