Sylvia Plath

I

Introduction

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), American poet and prose writer, noted for her intensely personal and brutally honest poems. Plath’s work has grown in influence and popularity since her suicide at age 30. She is widely regarded as one the first feminist poets and an icon of the women’s movement (see Women’s Rights).

II

Childhood and Early Writings

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, where she grew up. Her father, a German immigrant, was a professor of biology at Boston University and a specialist in bees. His death when Plath was eight years old profoundly affected her later life, marriage, and poetry. Plath began writing at a young age, and she published her poems in magazines and won literary prizes as a teenager.

Plath earned a scholarship to Smith College in Massachusetts and entered the school in 1950. In addition to her studies, she continued to write and publish poems and short stories.

In 1953, while still in college, Plath suffered a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide. She spent six months in a private hospital, where she received electroconvulsive therapy. This treatment became a recurrent image in her later writing.

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III

Marriage

After returning to Smith and graduating in 1955, Plath won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England. There she met the British poet Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. After spending two years in the United States, where Plath wrote and taught literature at Smith, the couple moved back to England in 1959. Plath gave birth to her first child, a daughter, in 1960. A son was born two years later. She separated from Hughes in 1962 and took an apartment in London with her two children.

IV

The Colossus

Plath’s first book, The Colossus (1960), was the only collection of her poetry published during her lifetime. In it she exhibited her meticulously crafted and self-analytical style. The book’s opening poem, “The Manor Garden,” imagined the experience of the baby daughter she was carrying. The last, “Poem for a Birthday,” explored her college breakdown and suicide attempt. In her journal, Plath described the “Birthday” poem as “an exercise begun, in grimness, turning into a fine, new thing: first of a series of madhouse poems.” Exploring the loss of identity in this lengthy poem, Plath writes of the experience of becoming an object acted upon by others rather than a person possessing free will.

Her experience of electroconvulsive therapy is referred to in several poems in The Colossus. “Poem for a Birthday” contains the lines “Now they light me up like an electric bulb. / For weeks I can remember nothing at all.” The six-line poem “The Hanging Man” also refers to the experience. With its obsessive explorations of death and rebirth, the book received positive reviews in England and was subsequently published in the United States.

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