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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=11

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Sylvia Plath including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/plath.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Sylvia Plath.

BIOGRAPHY

Of German American descent, Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts to Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath. Having immigrated to America from Silesia, Otto Plath was a Professor of Biology at Boston University and the author of Bumblebees and Their Ways published in 1934, two years after Sylvia was born. Interrupting the normal course of Sylvia's girlhood, Otto suffered a traumatic illness involving the amputation of a gangrenous leg. Then he died in 1940 when Sylvia was just eight years old. A creative writer herself, Aurelia Plath encouraged Sylvia's interest in poetry and literature. Sylvia attended Smith College on scholarship and also was appointed to the College Board of Mademoiselle magazine in 1953. That year, Sylvia suffered from bipolar depression and received electroconvulsive shock treatment. In August, she attempted suicide for the first time, but after six months of therapy was able to return to Smith where she graduated summa cum laude in English and won a Fulbright fellowship to Newnham College, Cambridge in 1955. There she met the British poet Ted Hughes whom she married in June of 1956. The following year, the Hugheses sailed to the United States where Sylvia taught in the Smith College English Department for a year. During 1958 and 1959, Sylvia and Ted lived in Boston and, while Ted's first volume The Hawk received much notoriety, Sylvia attended Robert Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University, where she met Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. After spending the fall at the writer's colony at Yaddo, New York, Sylvia gave birth to her daughter Frieda in April 1960. That spring the Hugheses moved from London to Devon where Sylvia studied beekeeping and entered into her most creative phase as a poet. In the fall of 1960, Plath published The Colossus and Other Poems and the following year, Plath wrote her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Meanwhile, Ted Hughes moved to the center of England's literary world through his contacts with the BBC and T. S. Eliot. Plath's son Nicholas was born in January 1962, but owing to Ted Hughes's infidelity, Plath separated from her husband that fall. It was at this time that she wrote with amazing intensity her so-called October poems that would appear in her posthumously published volume Ariel (1965). Returning to London as a single mother with two children, Plath suffered from depression and chronic flu-like symptoms in December of that year. Overwhelmed by the return of her depression, compounded by her isolation and ill health, Plath committed suicide on 11 February 1963, just two weeks before the publication of The Bell Jar. With the publication of Ariel, Plath became a central poet of her generation and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982 for her posthumous volume of Collected Poems.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. London: Heinemann, 1991.

Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998.

Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1994.

Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Strangeways, Al. Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998.

Sylvia Plath. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER