In her brief but momentous career, Sylvia Plath rewrote the story that women writers could tell in poetry and, to some extent, in fiction and diaries as well. Writing avant la lettre of American feminism, and before Adrienne Rich's feminist awakening, Plath wrote unforgettable poems concerning women's victimization, rage, and rebellion. Having studied Sigmund Freud and James Frazer, she also wrote poems with psychoanalytic and mythic dimensions, the most startling and unsettling such poems of her time. These poems enact loss and grief in such a devastating fashion that one wonders how the reader, much less the author, can survive them. Plath also involved political and social realities in her dramas of disclosure, so that her description of trees (in “Winter Trees”) as being “waist-deep in history” applies to her poetic speakers as well. Finally, Plath used words and forms with a fierce beauty that has no exact parallel in English-language poetry. Haunted herself, Plath continues, in the words of Jacqueline Rose, to “haunt our culture” today.
Plath's life is crucial and problematic in any consideration of her texts, because one cannot clearly distinguish the traumas she experienced from those she constructed in print. Yet one should not simply identify the one with the other. Plath redraws every boundary, including the one separating life from art. On the one hand, her poetry participates in the exposure of privacy that Deborah Nelson (in Pursuing Privacy) considers one of the hallmarks of American Cold War culture. On the other hand, Plath's poems and stories never open a transparent window onto her lived experience. They make verbal spectacles of that experience, transforming it into something rich and strange.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932, the first child of Otto Plath (a professor of Zoology and German at Boston University) and Aurelia Plath (an educated and cultured homemaker). Two years after Sylvia's birth, her brother Warren was born. Otto Plath, a German immigrant, was to write several scholarly articles on insects and arachnids, and one book, Bumblebees and their Ways (1934). Aurelia Plath, the daughter of Austrian immigrants, provided an enriched intellectual environment for her children and was ambitious for them. During her first years, Plath's life was unremarkable, though shaped by her father's imperious and remote personality. According to Plath's biographer, Linda Wagner-Martin (in Sylvia Plath: A Biography), Otto Plath gave his children personal attention for only thirty minutes each day. Virtually all of the parenting the children received was from Aurelia Plath, and the bond that formed between mother and daughter was both strong and ambivalent. In 1940, when Sylvia Plath was eight, her father died of gangrene, the result of long-untreated diabetes. Otto Plath had kept his condition secret from loved ones and doctors, perhaps indicating his stoicism or a hidden suicidalism. The loss was devastating to the family. Aurelia Plath went back to work as a teacher of secretarial skills, ending up at Boston University, where her husband had taught. The family endured precarious finances ever after. But the most serious effects were emotional. Sylvia Plath never truly recovered from her father's shocking death. Her writing registers its resonances at every stage of her career.
Encouraged by her mother, Plath became a stellar student. After graduating from Wellesley High School, she attended Smith College on full scholarship. Graduating from Smith summa cum laude, she won a Fulbright to study at Cambridge University in England, where she received her masters in English literature. Yet despite this record of great academic success, Plath's road was not smooth. In 1953, at the age of twenty, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills and hiding herself away in the cellar of her family home. The event is reflected in the distorting mirrors of her poem “Poem for a Birthday” and her novel The Bell Jar. Through the kind intervention of her mentor, the popular novelist Olive Higgins Prouty (author of Stella Dallas and Now, Voyager), Plath was institutionalized at the elite McLean's Hospital, received excellent psychiatric care from Dr. Ruth Beuscher, and seemed to make a quick recovery. But her problems with bi-polar mood disorder had begun, and they would not end until her death ten years later.
At Cambridge, a recovered and rather ebullient Sylvia Plath met the poet Ted Hughes at a party. She married him after a whirlwind courtship. These events are reflected in such stories as “Stone boy with Dolphin” and “That Widow Maganda”, both collected with Plath's other short fiction in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1979). The couple moved to the United States, where Plath taught freshman composition and American literature at Smith for a year. She then resigned from teaching, determining to stake everything on a writing career. She took a creative writing class at Boston University with Robert Lowell, just then making his “breakthrough” into a more personal style of poetry. Among the other students in the class was the fledgling autobiographical poet, Anne Sexton, which whom she bonded. Plath supported herself and her husband through secretarial jobs, an experience reflected in her story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”. Throughout it all, Plath wrote her own poetry and functioned as her husband's personal secretary.
After a stay at the Yaddo writer's colony, the couple returned to London, England in 1959. The next year saw the birth of their first child, a daughter named Frieda. It also saw the publication of Plath's first book of poetry, entitled The Colossus (1960). Neglected in its own day and even in ours, the volume brims with important and powerful poems. Although overshadowed by the even more harrowing texts to come, these poems set forth most of Plath's characteristic concerns and styles. They express a confusion about women's roles in relation to male control, a sense of marginality and inner contradiction, a struggle with low self-esteem combined with egotism, a horror at historical catastrophe, a paranoid dread of the social and physical environment, and an overwhelming desire for poetic voice, an obsession with the forms and modes of poetry itself.
The volume's title poem, for example, “The Colossus”, registers grief and anger over the loss of the father through the metaphor of a colossal, decaying statue, dominating an island on which his daughter is stranded. The poem expresses a Freudian notion of the child's sense of the father: unnaturally large but ready to be dismantled. Evoking Aeschylus' Oresteia, a dramatic trilogy about the consequences of a mother's murder of a father, the poem pictures an isolated space inhabited only by the daughter and her ambivalent memories of her father. The poem, though written in five-line stanzas with every word precise, spins out of control in its diction (“tumuli” competes with “mule-bray”) and in its feelings of overwhelming loss. Abjected by her memorializing labors, the daughter feels herself both a failure at them and married to them, resentful and devoted. She fears she can never get the statue, and undoubtedly herself, “put together entirely”. Such poems become both an indictment of patriarchy in all its guises and a testimony to patriarchy's enduring power.
Other poems of this period – not all of them collected in The Colossus – diagnose tensions within mother-daughter relations (“The Disquieting Muses”), heterosexual marriage (“The Snowman on the Moor”), pregnancy (“Metaphors”), the personal past (“Electra on Azalea Path”), the historical past (“The Thin People”), and art itself (“The Snake Charmer”). The poems demonstrate great formal and linguistic complexity. “Metaphors”, for example, proposes a Dickinsonian riddle of nine lines, each containing nine syllables. “Snakecharmer” constructs a terza rima out of slant rhymes, its allegory of creativity echoing Dante's The Divine Comedy in its stanza form and Genesis and the Hindu Vedas in its metaphorics: “let there be snakes!” “Electra on Azalea Path” alternates ten-line and eight-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, each stanza's irregular slant rhymes framed by rhyming first and last lines. This form produces an auditory effect that is oddly both ordered and disordered. The poem ends in a frightening blast of anguish: “I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, / My own blue razor rusting in my throat”. Such formally, imagistically, and emotionally powerful poems seem to some to forecast the even wilder poems to come. In fact, however, they adumbrate an adventurous and unnerving world of their own, a vivid theater of tropes.
In 1961 Plath and Hughes moved to a country home in Devon. Cold (the house was unheated) and exhausted, Plath spent the year writing poems that have been termed “transitional”, many of which would be published posthumously in Winter Trees (1971) before being collected with all of her extant poems in Collected Poems (1981). She also wrote a roman à clef called The Bell Jar, published a month before her death under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas.
The poems of 1961 include several now famous texts. “In Plaster” and “Tulips” evoke a hospitalized woman's split and conflicted identity, reflecting Plath's own experiences of having a miscarriage and an appendectomy during this period. “Blackberrying” and “The Moon and the Yew Tree” are nature poems, but of a special sort: they depict a brooding, ominous nature, reminiscent of Van Gogh's last paintings or some of Frost's and Stevens' darker musings. The beginning of “Blackberrying”, for example, suggests an empty scene similar to ones in Frost's “Acquainted with the Night” or Stevens' “the Snow Man”: “Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries”. As the poem progresses, however, it moves through a menacing landscape that is uniquely Plath's own: blackberry bushes laden with “hooks”, birds like “bits of burnt paper”, and finally a massive orange rock overlooking “nothing” but a pewter sea making a metallic din. Its carefully chosen images, contained within tidy nine-line stanzas, fairly scream their alienation, their burden of pain.
The Bell Jar (1963) received tepid reviews but has since become a critical and popular success. The novel provides a sharply-written first-person account of a twenty-year-old college student named Esther Greenwood. The novel's autobiographical impulse is instantly apparent, in that “Greenwood” is the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of “Sylvia” and “Esther” has the same number of letters. Much as Plath did in her twentieth year, Esther spends her summer working in New York at a woman's magazine, has a failed romantic relationship with a Yale undergraduate, becomes despondent after being rejected for a writing seminar, attempts suicide, is institutionalized, undergoes electroshock treatment, and ultimately recovers. The novel begins as social satire, includes wrenching descriptions of depression and a suicide attempt, and ends in a hopeful manner as Esther steps back into the world. The Bell Jar is at once a bildungsroman (a novel of development or education), a kunstlersroman (a novel of a writer's development), and a picaresque (a journey through space and time). Moreover, it provides a savvy critique of gender and class relations in Cold War America, a psychological journey through illness and recuperation, a complex exploration of female identity, and a brilliant play of metaphors along a narrative line. Although Plath dismissed the book as a “potboiler” when describing it to her mother, probably because she knew it would hurt her mother's feelings, she felt excited while writing it, and it remains an impressive achievement today. There is no telling where Plath's fictional art might have led her, if she had survived to write additional novels. She actually did draft a second novel – a story of a dissolving marriage called Double Exposure – that Ted Hughes either lost or destroyed after Plath's death.
Early in 1962 Plath's son Nicholas was born. Soon thereafter, her verse play for voices, “Three Women”, was produced on BBC radio. Some critics consider this text her finest and most touching work. It allows three different women to speak, each of whom has a very different experience of childbirth. The first woman has a normal birth, the second has a miscarriage, and the third decides to give her child up for adoption. These voices construct a discourse in which women's bodies, consciousness and experience are at the center. “Three Women” prophesies a style of autonomy and alterity that Plath was never again to achieve. Soon after the play's production, Plath discovered that Ted Hughes was having an affair. He left her after a confrontation. She and her children moved back to London where she sought to support herself through writing, supplemented by gifts from her mother. Emotionally devastated and physically ill, Plath wrote the poems that ultimately brought her great fame, reaching a creative peak in the month of October. These poems were for a volume she planned to entitled Ariel. After her death, Ted Hughes rearranged the poems, omitted some that he found particularly painful, and allowed them to be published under Plath's chosen title.
In October 1962 Plath wrote virtually a poem a day, composing in the still of the night when the children were asleep. As her thirtieth birthday neared, she wrote a furious trilogy of poems about her parents and her husband. The first of these poems, “Daddy”, written in five-line stanzas with most lines ending in an “oo” of lament, exorcises the ghost of a tyrannical father and the memory of a husband who resembles him. These characters, though surely inspired by Otto Plath and Ted Hughes, go far beyond empirical referents to suggest more generally patriarchal violence and control. The poem ends with one of the most striking and ambiguous denunciations in poetic history: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.” Is the speaker through with her father and with her denunciation of him, or is she through with her own voice, her own life? Is the speaker even distinguishable from her father at the end, or does his murderous voice merge into hers? Sophisticated yet primitive, “Daddy” instantly became the apex of Robert Lowell's “confessional” movement in poetry and one of the most powerful and oft-cited poems of the century.
Four days after writing “Daddy,” Plath wrote “Medusa,” an ambivalent castigation of the mother. Also written in five-line stanzas, though without the keening line-endings, the poem figures the mother as a “medusa”—at once the Gorgon monster of classical myth and a small jellyfish with a capacity to sting and paralyze. When the speaker proclaims at the end of the poem, “There is nothing between us,” an ambiguity presents itself that is similar to the one at the end of “Daddy”. Is the daughter completely free of the mother or totally entangled with her? One day later Plath wrote the third poem of her domestic trilogy, “The Jailer”, using the same five-line stanzas. This is one of the poems that Hughes omitted from Ariel (1966), though it was later included in its proper order in Plath's Collected Poems. The husband in this poem drugs and rapes his abused wife, feeding her a “ghost ration” of lies and smiles. She dreams of escape but wonders what he would “do” without her. Like the father and the mother in the preceding poems, the husband is the speaker's frightening double. Unable to achieve either intimacy or autonomy, she cannot live with him or without him, for he, like the others, has invaded her soul.
Other poems Plath wrote in October 1962 include “By Candlelight” and “Nick and the Candlestick”, almost serene poems about children. But she also wrote poems about suicide (“Ariel”), self-mutilation (“Cut”), delirium (“Fever 103”), and one that, like “Daddy”, intertwines domestic relations with the ethos of Nazi Germany (“Lady Lazarus”). Although Plath has frequently been criticized for her use of Nazi imagery, it is perhaps her single most brilliant stroke. It identifies the motives of patriarchal authoritarianism and violence with both historical event and the domestic circle, refusing to isolate evil outside of the shelter of home, insisting that we recognize the process of totalitarianism wherever it occurs. Poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” may be said to restore memory and moral judgment to both the Holocaust and the smaller injuries and deaths that occur every day, hidden away from sight. In such poems, Plath discovered a new way of writing history by inventing a new language of domesticity.
By early 1963 Plath was writing eerily detached short poems with one-word titles such as “Kindness”, “Words”, “Balloons” and “Edge.” The furies were banked, and so apparently were the creative fires. “Edge”, perhaps the last poem she wrote, states objectively and calmly: “We have come so far, it is over.” Six days later, On February 11, that textual prophecy became empirical fact. Carefully protecting her sleeping-children from the fumes, she put her head in the kitchen oven and turned on the gas. By the time she was discovered, she had suffocated.
Plath's stories and poems do not transparently reproduce her lived experience but rather compose verbal spectacles with their own rules and regulations, their own crises and pleasures. In her texts we witness a struggle for voice, creativity, and standing. We make our way through feelings of abandonment, anger, loneliness, and self-doubt. We witness female characters moving from submission and enslavement to subversion and rebellion—and even (in “Three Women”) to autonomy, self-acceptance, and the invention of an appropriate language. We watch as personal and public discourses rub off on each other, creating an ambivalent, contingent kinship between the suffering, private poet and the wretched of the earth. In her best poems Plath was able to merge personal disclosure with social disclosure, revelation with spectacle, and vulnerability with irony. She composed the most vivid and memorable poems of her era, breaking the limits of what lyric poetry could be and do.
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Citation: Axelrod, Steven. "Sylvia Plath". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 September 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3579, accessed 02 April 2025.]
