Detailed Biography of Sylvia Plath including her works

Happiness is a description of Plath’s life that flickers altogether to much, and from magnifiscent explotions of light to the somber absence of flame. Her candle burnt solidly throughout her earlier years, but as her experiences brought her to more intimate exploration of life, Sylvia found herself spiraling into vicious cycles of depression involving sickness, and instability. This article will investigate the various paths her life took and what poems this inspired.

Sylvia Plath showed great, and just, potential in her early years, publishing her first poem at the age of eight for the Boston Herald entitled What I see and hear on hot summer nights. She and her mother moved through Massachusetts and then Boston, after her father’s death. She earned straight A’s throughout high school, and was admitted to Smith College back in Massachusetts, riding out the wake of her father’s death in 1940 on her achievements of late. She then had her story And Summer Will Not Come Again by Seventeen Magazine, and “Bitter Strawberries” by the Christian Science Monitor. The rejection of a publication would lead her into a cycle of depression.

Her first thoughts of suicide occurred during

On January 17th 1962 Plath gave birth to a second child, Nicholas, but was concerned when she noticed Hughes’ distancing himself from the children. She worked on her poems from four to eight in the morning then, which were the only quiet times left for thought anymore. They moved to Devon and sublet their flat in London to Assia and David Wevill. She managed to produce Little Fugue, An Appearance, Crossing the water, Among the Narcissi, Pheasant, Elm, Event, and The Rabbit Catcher during the spring of 1962. Plath described this year to her mother as the richest and happiest time of her life, just after which she found that Hughes was frolicking around with Assia, the woman to whom they had sublet their apartment in London. Sylvia reacted accordingly, tore up the only manuscript of her birthday present to Ted, which was a continuation of the Bell Jar, burnt thousands of Ted’s letters and drafts of poems. During this period Sylvia wrote Words Heard (by accident over the phone), Poppies in July, and Burning Letters. Hughes continued to see Assia. Plath and Hughes’ final attempt at reconciliation, come September 1962 in Ireland, ended in disaster.

On April 1st 1960, Ted and Sylvia’s first child, Frieda, is born. Sylvia continued her works and completed You’re, The Hanging Man, Sleep in the Mojave Desert, On Deck and Two Campers in Cloud Country. In October Colossus is finally published. Her Miscarriage on February 2nd 1961 inspired a flow of Poems on the issue; Parliament Hills Fields, Whitsun, Zoo Keeper’s Wife, Face Lift, Morning Song, Heavy Women and Barren Woman. She received a contract to write for the New Yorker. Her surgery, to have her appendix removed, influenced Tulips. She followed in March with two more poems I Am Vertical and Magi. In the Fall Sylvia continued her burst of poems through Insomniac, Widow, The Rival, Stars on the Dordogne, Wuthering Heights, The Moon and the Yew Tree, and Blackberrying. She submitted her autobiographical novel Bell Jar to her publisher for consideration.

She wrote Mad Girl’s Love Song during an obsession with Dylan Thomas, after a missed opportunity to meet him. Her obsession estranged her from friends and led her into a state of insomnia, which worsened after her application to Harvard Summer School was rejected. After admitting to her mother that she wanted to die when confronted over some injuries on her legs to which she answered: “I just wanted to see if I had the guts”, Sylvia was sent for psychiatric help, and prescribed to undergo electric shock therapy.

On the 24th of August 1953, when she was finally left alone in the house, she pried open a ‘lock-box’ containing sleeping pills, left a note that said she was off on a long walk. She crawled into a small place through her cellar, where she consumed 40 sleeping pills. This sparked a search team that went as far as Boston and

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