You might have heard of Sylvia Plath before in your former English classes or heard her name tossed around in a movie or show. She was an ambitious and dynamic poet of the 20th century. Some of her most notable works include, ‘’Daddy’’, ‘’Lady Lazarus’’, and ‘’Mad Girls Love Song’’. Some may argue that she was most famously known for committing suicide by sticking her head in the oven. Whether you recognize her name for this incident or her poems, we can all agree that Plath’s influence and strong diction still resonates today.
Early Life
Slyvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was daughter to Otto Plath, a college professor of German immigrant descent, and Aurelia Schober, one of his students. The poets’ earliest years are described as decent until they weren’t. At the age of eight, Otto Plath had died due to complications concerning diabetes. According to Poets.Org, Otto ‘’had been strict, and both his authoritarian attitudes and his death drastically defined Plath’s relationships and her poems—most notably in her elegiac and infamous poem “Daddy’’. The poem “Daddy,” written in 1962, discusses her relationship with her deceased father. Through vivid imagery of death and darkness as well as allusion to the holocaust, Slyvia Plath ends the authoritarianism influence her father still held in her life in this impassioned poem. It was around this time, after her father’s death that young Plath began writing. She carried a journal around with her everywhere and entered serval literary contests and won various awards and accolades for her work. She published her first poem at the age of eight. Her first major publication came in 1950, when she sold her poems to the Christian Science Monitor shorty after her high school graduation. Slyvia Plath was a bright young woman and went onto attend Smith College, graduating summa cum laude in 1955. Plath had earned a Fulbright scholarship that brought her to Cambridge University in England, later that same year of college graduation. It was there in England Plath had met her husband, Ted Hughes.
Mental Heath
It was during those school years that had Plath suffered from severe depressions that would ultimately lead to her death in 1963. The poetry organization states that in a journal entry of Slyvia’s, dated June 20, 1958, she wrote, “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” This can be viewed as a description of bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder a mental illness that can cause unpredictable shifts in a ones mood and was not very well received during Plath’s lifetime. In Auguust of 1953, when Slyvia was twenty years old, she tried suicide using sleeping pills. Fortunately, she survived and received treatment with electro-shock therapy. Sylvia Plath’s struggles with mental illness can be seen turned fictious in her most famous novel, The Bell Jar.
Ted Hughes
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes first met in February of 1956 at a party in Cambridge. During a BBC interview in 1961, Plath reminisces about this moment saying, “I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I’d read some of Ted’s poems in this magazine and I was very impressed, and I wanted to meet him.” She further shares, “Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later… We kept writing poems to each other.” The two were married on June 16, 1956. From the outside their relationship seemed relatively normal and happy. The two had their first child, a daughter named Frieda, on April 1st, 1960. The following year, Plath endured a serious miscarriage with their second child. Plath later revealed in a letter to her therapist that Ted Hughes beat her two days before the miscarriage. Her various works, including “Parliament Hill Fields,” depict this tough loss. Their son, Nicholas, was born in1962, and this is when things got reportedly ‘’complicated.” Hughes had been discovered to be having an affair with a woman named Assia Wevill. When Hughes refused to end the affair, they divorced in 1962 and Plath tried to take her life multiple times after the separation. Plath raised her two children in a small flat, where she took her own life from carbon monoxide poisoning when she stuck her head in her oven while her two children were asleep in the next room.
After
During her last years, Slyvia wrote with great speed and dedication, fully engrossing herself in her work. Many of these works were published soon after her tragic death, including her Ariel poems, Daddy, and Lady Lazarus. Sylvia Plath’s artistry and dedication to writing proves her to be inspirational and influential to aspiring poets and women alike. Her influence stems from her ability to vividly express complex emotions and inner struggles. Her poetic imagery and confessional style opened new avenues for exploring personal and societal issues. Plath's candid discussions about mental health and the challenges faced by women in the mid-20th century contributed to a broader dialogue on these topics. Despite her tragic end, her literary legacy endures, impacting readers and writers alike.