Sylvia Plath

1. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

2. Childhood/Growing up • Born to middle class parents • Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts • Her father (a college professor and expert on bees) died when she was eight • She published her first poem when she was eight

3. Childhood/Growing up (cont) • She was sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted • On the surface, she was a model student and daughter • Popular in school • Earned straight A’s and won the “best prizes”

4. Childhood/Growing Up (cont) • Entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 • By this time she already had an impressive list of publications • While at Smith she wrote over 400 poems

5. The beginning of her problems… • Her surface perfection was underlain by grave personal discontinuities • Some of these problems may have been caused by her father’s death when she was 8 • Served as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City during her junior year at Smith

6. The beginning of her problems… • She nearly succeeded in killing herself with sleeping pills the summer after returning from NYC • She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel titled The Bell Jar • She graduated from Smith summa cumlaude in 1955 and won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England

7. Adult Life • In 1956, she married the English poet Ted Hughes • In 1960, her first book of poetry, The Colossus, was published • She and Ted Hughes settled in the English country village of Devon • Less than two years after the birth of their 1st child, their marriage broke apart

8. Adult Life / Falling Apart • The winter of 1962-63 was one of the coldest in centuries • Sylvia, who lived in a London flat, now had 2 children, was ill, and was low on money • The hardness of her life seemed to increase her need to write, as she often worked between 4-8 a.m., before the children woke • During this time, she sometimes finished one poem per day

9. Adult Life / Falling Apart • These last poems were deeper, as if a powerful self had grabbed control of her • Death and psychic pain were common in these poems • On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30

10. Details of her death… • “She placed her head in a gas oven after completely sealing the rooms between herself and her children. She left a note for the man who lived downstairs…to call her doctor. However, rather than rising, the gas seeped through the floor and knocked Mr. Thomas out cold for several hours. An au pair girl was to arrive at nine o'clock that morning to help Plath with the care of her children. Arriving promptly at 9, the au pair could not get into the flat. It has been suggested that Plath's timing & planning of this suicide attempt was too precise, too coincidental, not to be ‘serious’ or intended…”

11. Publications After Her Death • Two years after her death, Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published • This was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and The Collected Poems (edited by Ted Hughes) in 1981

12. Publications • Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.

13. Other information about the family: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/03/23/plath.son.suicide/index.html

14. Information obtained from: http://www.sylviaplath.de/ http://www.sylviaplath.info/biography.html http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/11