Sylvia Plath
Born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath
published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled
toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model
daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By
the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an
impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred
poems.
Sylvia's surface perfection was however underlain by grave
personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death
of her father (he was a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was
eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned
from a stay in New York City where she had been a student ``guest editor'' at
Mademoiselle Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing
sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical
novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving
electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and
literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a
Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.
In 1956 she
married the English poet Ted Hughes, and in 1960, when she was 28, her first
book, The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book---formally
precise, well wrought---show clearly the dedication with which Sylvia had
served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in
the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Ted Hughes settled for
a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after
the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.
The winter of
1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Sylvia living in a small London
flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness of her
life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four
and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem
a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed
control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost
tactile.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking
gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last
poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees
in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted
Hughes.
http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/famous/sylviaplath.html
Born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath
published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled
toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model
daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By
the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an
impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred
poems.
Sylvia's surface perfection was however underlain by grave
personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death
of her father (he was a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was
eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned
from a stay in New York City where she had been a student ``guest editor'' at
Mademoiselle Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing
sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical
novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving
electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and
literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a
Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.
In 1956 she
married the English poet Ted Hughes, and in 1960, when she was 28, her first
book, The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book---formally
precise, well wrought---show clearly the dedication with which Sylvia had
served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in
the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Ted Hughes settled for
a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after
the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.
The winter of
1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Sylvia living in a small London
flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness of her
life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four
and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem
a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed
control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost
tactile.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking
gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last
poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees
in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted
Hughes.
http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/famous/sylviaplath.html