1. Sylvia Plath, her life and how it effected her poetry Sylvia Plath endured much pain through the Great depression, her fathers death, and a miscarriage that led to many of her ideas for her works and finally, a successful suicide attempt.
2. “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.“ ~Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath, born October 27, 1932, spent most of her childhood in Massachusetts with her mother, brother, and father, who was about 21 years older than her mother, and died shortly after Plath’s 8th birthday. She had already published a poem at 8 years old and showed promise with her paintings as well. During her third year of college Plath was granted an arrangement as a guest editor for a New York magazine and during that year was her first documented suicide attempt by overdosing under her house and a short stay at a mental hospital followed that. On June 16, 1956, Plath married Ted Hughes, an English poet. When the couple learned Plath was pregnant they moved to the United Kingdom where she suffered a miscarriage in February, 1961. Plath died February 11, 1963 by suicide. She went through great measures to make sure someone would find her and take care of her kids before/during the suicide. She placed wet towels under the door and turned on the gas oven and stuck her head inside. Her headstone reads “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted.”
3. Critics Say… Many of the critics can pick out Plath’s life story within her works. Some choose to ignore the work itself and get to the meaning behind it and what it actually contains. “.. To me who was soaked in Williams it seemed much more formful, and indeed classical, than it did to him who knew only the English tradition; but equally there could be no doubt as to the hysteria of the book, and the woman had committed suicide. (Beake, Pathetic Fallacies)” “Many Plath poems are concerned at one level or another with suffering: with sickness, injury, torture, madness, death. Titles alone, of many Plath poems, reveal this: "Cut," for example, and "Fever 103°," "Paralytic," "Contusion," "Thalidomide," "Amnesiac," "Witch Burning." This seems not surprising in that Plath's life and the lives of those close to her contained more than an average share of illness and loss (Dobbs, Viciousness in the Kitchen).” “… The "terrible fish" is not simply the image of aging and decay apparent in the surface narrative; it is another incarnation of the barely suppressed demon of sensuality and rage that charges Plath's poetry as it haunted her life (Freedman, The Monster in Plath’s ‘Mirror’).” “..She valued them far more highly than her prose, because at least they reflected, often very beautifully, the obsessive inner life that made her write them. But though they reflected it, she felt they did not contain it, did not release it(Hughes, On Sylvia Plath).”
4. Citations 1. Beake, Fred. "Pathetic Fallacies." Lynx: Poetry of Bath n. pag. Web. 15 Feb 2010. <http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com/lynx/lynx56.html>. 2. "Sylvia Plath." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2010. Web. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath>. 3. Dobbs, Jeannine. "`Viciousness in the Kitchen': Sylvia Plath's Domestic Poetry." Modern Language Studies 7.2 (1977): 11-25. Web. 15 Feb 2010. <http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/dobbs.html>. 4. Freedman, William. "The Monster in Plath's 'Mirror'." Gale Literature 108.5 (1993): 152-69. Web. 15 Feb 2010. <http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/freedman.html>. 5. Hughes, Ted. "On Sylvia Plath." Raritan 14.2 (1994): 1-10. Web. 15 Feb 2010. <http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/hughesonsylvia.html>. 6. “Sylvia Plath Quotes." Brainy Quote. 2010. Brainy Media, Web. 15 Feb 2010. <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/sylvia_plath.html>.
