Sylvia Plath: Life 'n' Works

In order to understand the poetry of Sylvia Plath we must know her life in details. Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in a highly educated family of America. Her mother Aurelia came from Austria to America and received her education there. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University and he was specialized in bees. She married her professor Otto Plath who was older than her by twenty one years. Otto Plath and Aurelia had two daughters – Sylvia and Warren.
When Sylvia was eight and Warren two their father Otto Plath dies. Her father had come to America from Germany and this German background partly, explains Plath’s presentation of of the father-figure in ‘Daddy’ as a Nazi dictator. Before the death of her father in 1940 from diabetes. Sylvia had a sort of ambivalent attitude towards his father. From the letters of Sylvia’s mother we came to know that Otto Plath, fearing that his illness was communicable, kept himself aloof from his children. Sylvia herself said later in life that he was an autocrat whom she adored and despised that she often wished that he were dead and that when he actually died, she suffered from feelings of guilt, imagining that she had killed him. Their mother a school mistress brought them up and educated them with great care but in great troubles. But when she felt impatient or irritated with the mother, Sylvia again experienced feelings of guilt. The two sisters were brilliant as students. From her very childhood Sylvia showed her talent in creativity. She began to write poems, short stories and autobiography. While a student of Smith College she suffered a nervous break down and in 1953 she tried to commit suicide taking heavy doses of sleeping pills. She was any how saved and was placed under the treatment of a psychiastrist. She was sent to London and admitted into the Cambridge University, there she met the rising English poet Ted Hughes, fell in love with him and married him in 1956 she came back to America and taught in her old Smith college for a year. In 1959 she returned to London . Her first son was born in 1960 and in the same year her first book ‘The Colossus’ was also published. . In 1962 her second son was born. But her relationship with the husband turned bitter and they were separated from each other. Her mother Aurelia asked her to go back to America but she preferred London. In 1962 her first autobiographical novel was published under a pseudonym. During the winter it was bitter cold. Electricity became scare due to workers’ strike. She faced a terrible problem with her children. She was exhausted bodily and mentally. Then she was only thirty years old. She finally committed suicide in London on February 11, 1963.
Thus Plath had a troubled childhood. Her marriage also turned out to be unhappy. She had suicidal tendencies and the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty one and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. The facts of her life cast their shadows on her works. Her major poetries are based on her biographical events. Her first collections of poems ‘The colossus’, published in 1956. This perhaps her only poetical works that was published before her death. Her other works were published after her death between 1965 and 1979. Her major works are:
A winter ship
The colossus and other poems
The Bell Jar (published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas)
American Poetry now
Three Woman
Ariel
Uncollected poems
Crossing the Water
Crystal Gazer & Other poems
Fiesta Melons
Winter Trees
Lyonesse:Hitherto uncollected poems
Pursuit
The Bed Book
Letters Home
Collected Poems
The Journals of Sylvia Plath
Selected poems
More information:
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