Sylvia Plath's Life and Works ( Biography )

 

Sylvia Plath
Life

Sylvia Plath's Life and Works :

 Sylvia Plath, an American poet and novelist is best known for novel "The Bell Jar". She explores the themes of death, self and nature in her works that express her uncertain attitude toward the universe.

 Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932, to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father was a professor of Biology at Boston University. Sylvia was only eight years old when her father died. She was left with feelings of grief, guilt and anger that would haunt her for life and led her to create most of her poetry. Plath was a brilliant student.

 Plath lived in Winthrop with her mother and younger brother, Warren until 1942. These early years gave her a powerful awareness of the beauty and terror of nature and a strong love and fear of the ocean. In 1942 her mother found a job as a teacher and purchased a house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a respectable, middle-class, educational community that also influenced Plath's life and values. Her first story, "And Summer Will Not Come Again", was published in Seventeen magazine in August 1950. In September 1950 Plath entered Smith College in North Hampton, Massachusetts, on a scholarship. There she once again excelled in her studies academically and socially. Referred to as "the golden girl" by teachers and peers, she planned her writing career in detail. She filled notebooks with stories and poems, shaping her words carefully and winning many awards.

 Now it was a time to explore herself to the outer world. In August 1952 Plath won a fiction contest held by Mademoiselle, earning her a position as a guest editor at the magazine in June 1953. Her experiences in New York City, were depressing and later became the basis for her novel The Bell Jar (1963) . Upon her return home Plath, tired of her image as the All-American girl, suffered a serious mental breakdown, tried to kill herself, and was given shock treatments. In February 1953 she had recovered enough to return to Smith College. She graduated and won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University in England, where she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes. They were married in June 1956 in London, England.

 Completing her graduate degree, Plath returned to America to accept a teaching position at Smith for the 1957-1958 school year. She quit after a year to devote all her time to writing. For a while she attended a poetry course given by American poet Robert Lowell, where she met American poet Anne Sexton. Sexton's and Lowell's influence were important to her development as a poet. Both urged her to write about very private subjects. Plath and her husband were invited as writers-in-residence to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where they lived and worked for two months. It was here that Plath completed many of the poems collected in The Colossus (1960), her first volumes of poems. Her first child, Frieda, was born in 1960. Another child, Nicholas, was born two years later. "The colossus" was praised by critics for its "fine craft" and "brooding sense of danger and lurking horror" at man's place in the universe. But it was criticized for its absence of a personal voice. "Three Women" is like much of Plath's later poetry in that its structure is dramatic and expresses the highly personal themes that mark her work.

 In order to understand poetry of Sylvia Plath, we need to be aware of at least three crucial biographical facts which cast their shadows on her work: one, the premature death of her father when she was barely eight, two, the separation from her husband , Ted Hughes, who took on the role of a father surrogate; and three, her suicide attempt, the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty-one and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. On these three events is based the major poetry of Sylvia Plath, its cries of helpless rage alternating with gloomy despair, its narcissistic concern with the individual self colouring all themes and subjects she chooses to write of.