Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th

Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet

One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and her strong suspicion of his adultery with the English poet Assia Wevill ("Sylvia Plath"; "Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963" 2). Sylvia Plath had also made several previous suicide attempts, beginning at age 20, or perhaps even earlier, always precipitated by the spells of depression and debilitating self-doubt that dogged the poet from early adolescence on (Neurotic Poets, Sylvia Plath 6-7). As Plath wrote, in her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published in January 1963, less than a month before her suicide, in describing a suicide attempt by her main character Esther Greenwood:

It would take two motions. One wrist, then the other wrist. Three motions, if you

Counted changing the razor from hand to hand. Then I would step into the tub and lie down. (165)

According to a posthumously-produced video biography of Plath, numerous critics and biographers of hers have suggested that Sylvia Plath tended to romanticize the idea of suicide, both in her writing and in her own life ("Sylvia Plath"). As Clarissa Roche, an American friend of the poet and her husband's living near them in London at the time recalls, in that video biography: "Sylvia loved to show her wrists. She spoke of 'having a go' at suicide, like someone 'has a go' at tournament tennis" ("Sylvia Plath"). Additionally, one of Sylvia Plath's better-known poems, Lady Lazarus, from her posthumously-published Ariel collection (1965) describes a female speaker defiantly rising, like Lazarus, from each of several suicide attempts:

Dying

Is an art, like everything else

I do it exceptionally well

I do it so it feels like hell

I do it so it feels real

I guess you'd say I have a call [HIDDEN]

Another well-known Sylvia Plath poem, Daddy, also from Plath's 1965 Ariel collection, alludes to the suicide attempt of the speaker, at age 20 (Plath's own age when she had her first nervous breakdown and subsequently made her first documented suicide attempt ), based on a wish to join her deceased father in death:

I was ten when they buried you

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do

But they pulled me out of the sack

And they stuck me together with glue (57-62)

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 to Otto Plath, a Polish immigrant to the United States of German background, and Aurelia Shober Plath, a first-generation American whose parents had come from Austria (Neurotic Poets 1). Sylvia's beloved father, Otto, died of complications in 1940, which left the eight-year-old Sylvia deeply depressed, and may have been a catalyst, as well, for the poet's lifelong struggles with depression ("Sylvia Plath"). The video "Sylvia Plath" also describes Aurelia Plath as being excessively pushy and ambitious for her brilliant only daughter's academic success, a sort of academic "stage mother," and of Sylvia's father as having been, before his death, the parent to whom Sylvia had been much closer ("Sylvia Plath").

Interestingly and at first seemingly ironically, however, Sylvia Plath's well-known poem Daddy (1965) makes a monster, a Nazi, and even a vampire out of the speaker's late father, perhaps Otto Plath. According to the critic Sandra Gilbert, however, (within the video "Sylvia Plath") the poet's real intention of that poem had been not so much to demonize Plath's father, but to instead deconstruct (and then reconstruct for herself, but in a less positive way) her idealized memories of her adored deceased father, who had left her all too early, so that she herself might finally move on in life. The writing of the poem Daddy, in the final weeks of her life, then, may have represented for Plath a sort of last effort at self-therapy. If so, however, that effort was clearly insufficient; on February 11, 1963, the poet took her own life ("Sylvia Plath, 1932-1963").

Early on, Sylvia excelled in school, earning top grades and winning a scholarship to Smith College (2). Her first nervous breakdown and suicide attempt occurred during a summer internship in New York at the magazine Mademoiselle. She was then 20 years old.

She recovered sufficiently, albeit with difficulty, to return to Smith in the fall, graduated with top honors, and won a Fulbright scholarship to study the following year at Oxford University. She met the English poet Ted Hughes in early 1956. After a tumultuous courtship, they married in June of that year (Neurotic Poets 3-4). Subsequently, they spent a year in the United States, where Sylvia had secured a post as a visiting professor, but returned to England the following year, where Sylvia worked on her first novel, The Bell Jar.