This is relevant to American Literature Sylvia Plath

1. Introduction to Sylvia Plath
Amna Fayyaz
Department of English
GCWUF

2. Biographical Information
• - Born in Massachusetts to European immigrant
parents
•
• - Suffered from depression and made several
suicide attempts, finally succeeding (failing?) in
1963 when she was 30.
•
• - In 1983, she posthumously won the Pulitzer
Prize for her poetry.

7. What is Plath famous for?
• Her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, depicts a
talented woman slowly descending into insanity. It is also
a standard for feminist literature.
•
• Quotes from the novel:
• - “If you expect nothing from anybody you won’t ever be
disappointed.”
• - “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of
silence. It was my own silence.”
• - “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at
one time and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell.”
• - “The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I
simply hadn’t thought about it.”

8. Plath’s struggle with depression
• Throughout her life, Plath struggled with
depression.
• Because of her emotional state, Plath was
institutionalized and underwent shock therapy,
which drove her to greater emotional strife.
•
• In addition to her alleged suicide attempt when
she was 10, she tried to kill herself when she was
19.

9. Recurring Themes
• While Plath’s hundreds of poems focused on different
topics, there are three themes that recur throughout
her work, often in conjunction with one another:
•
• 1. She used her poems to confess
• 2. She often wrote of overwhelming male
(father/husband) figures
• 3. Birth is also a subject common to her works.
•

10. Plath on confessional poetry
• "I think my poems immediately come out of the
sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I
must say I cannot sympathize with these cries
from the heart that are informed by nothing
except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I
believe that one should be able to control and
manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying,
like madness, being tortured, this sort of
experience, and one should be able to
manipulate these experiences with an informed
and intelligent mind."*

11. What is Confessional Poetry?
• Confessional poetry uses the “I.” It often deals
with subjects not often written about publicly:
death, trauma, depression.

13. “I’ll never speak to God again—”
• Plath was devastated by her father’s death
believing that he could have prevented his
death if he actually seeked treatment. She
often compared his death to suicide.
• When she was 10 years old, Plath allegedly
tried to cut her own throat and engaged in
what is now called “cutting.”*
• In her poem “Daddy,” Plath wrote, “At twenty,
I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you.

14. Ted Hughes
• Born in 1930 and died in 1998.
• Became British Poet Laureate in 1984 and remained so until his
death and is continually called one of the most influential British
writers of the 20th Century.
• Early in his career, Hughes focused on nature and the violence of it,
and later on in his career became a modernist poet and often
focused on mythological archetypes.
• He and Sylvia Plath married in 1956
and had two children.
•

15. Sylvia plath: her importance to American
literature
• Sylvia Plath’s importance in American history is derived
from the literary excellence of her writing, and her
works show the plight of mid-twentieth century
women. Plath's significance comes from her role as a
poet and the ways in which her writing opened the
door for exploration of a feminist-martyr to patriarchal
society, as well as the treatment of psychiatric patients.
• As a post-World War Two confessional poet, or a poet
who wrote based on a personal attachment to her
work, Plath’s life can be explored through her poetry
and stories. By aligning the works of Sylvia Plath
alongside the events in her life, one is better able to
understand the poet's importance to American history.