Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Massachusetts.
Her parents, Otto Emil and Aurelia Plath, adored their daughter, who idolized only her father, who taught at Boston University and was a specialist in bees. His scientific writings and will made a great impression on the sensitive Sylvia, and she imitated her father in everything. His death from diabetes in 1940 was a tragedy for Sylvia, but perhaps it was this sad event that awakened her literary talent. Sylvia’s first poem appeared when she was less than eight years old in the pages of the school paper, the Boston Herald. She was a star in school, getting straight A’s, publishing her poems and short stories, winning contests in which she participated, and being a model student and daughter.
In 1950 she won a grant to attend Smith College, where she wrote more than four hundred poems and several dozen short stories. For one of these she won first place in the Mademoiselle magazine contest and the opportunity to go to New York. After a short trip, depressed by the big city and the cruelty of those around her, Sylvia fell into a severe depression, which ended with a note: “Gone for a walk, do not lose me, I will be home tomorrow. She took a blanket, a bottle of water, and a pack of sleeping pills with her. A week later her mother and brother found Sylvia in the basement of their house. She didn’t want to be found. The recovery was long, painful, but successful. The following year, Plath graduated with honors from college and wrote a paper entitled “The Magic Mirror: Doppelgangers in Novels,” for which she received a grant to study at Cambridge.
She immediately fell in love with this small and cozy city. She gave all her time to her studies, and in the 1950s, this 23-year-old single girl seemed to others, to say the least, strange. But one day, buying another issue of the student almanac, she read a poem by the young poet Ted Hughes, whom she had met that very evening. Then she wrote in her diary, “One day he will bring me death.
On June 16, 1956, they were married. Hughes was a really talented, independent poet, and his first book, A Hawk in the Rain, won an award from the New York Poetry Center. The couple was able to use the money to travel to America, where they spent several years teaching college and creating new poems and stories. Sylvia’s style was designed for publication in women’s magazines, which was unacceptable for the serious literature into which she aspired. It was not until after the birth of her first child that her book, Johnny’s Fears and the Dream Bible, was published, and the following year her first poetry collection, Collosum and Other Poems, was published, which was critically acclaimed. But at the time, no one could even imagine the depth, power, and beauty in Sylvia Plath’s poems.
In the spring of 1962, she and her husband moved to Devon, where Sylvia completed her most famous novel, Under the Glass Cover, and a few months later she had her second child. In the fall of 1962, because of Ted’s infidelity, a divorce took place, and it was a tragedy for Sylvia. But October 1962 was a real poetic boom in her writing. She wrote 25 poems, all of which went into the golden fund of American and world literature. “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Detective,” and “Nick and the Candle” were imbued with genuine passion, anguish. Sylvia claimed that the Lord God spoke through her lips. She woke up at four in the morning and wrote poems until sunrise.
In November, Sylvia wrote equally outstanding poems, “Death and ©,” “Poppies in November,” “Gulliver” and “Winter Trees.” But material hardship crippled Sylvia’s already frail health. The winter of 1963 was the coldest winter of the twentieth century in Britain. Sick, helpless, Sylvia tried to find help, but to no avail. Her last poems were imbued with resignation to fate, some somnambulism, indifference.
Sylvia’s creative legacy is small: several poetry collections, a novel. Her diaries… But one cannot find in them, either, the reasons for her departure at such a young age. It is said that her husband censored her diaries, he even burned two of them, where there was a clue. Hugh later confessed that he had burned the diaries and said it was his way of trying to protect his children. It was only just before his death that he published his “Birthday Letters,” in which he shared only in part what he had been silent about for years.
Sylvia Plath, a beautiful, brilliant, promising young poet, left many letters, diaries, and poems that were published after her death. She is considered a martyr poetess who sought union with her late father, but at the same time struggled with a sense of hopelessness and clung to life as best she could.
