Sylvia Plath, 1932 - 1963

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts (1932). She was virtually unknown for most of her life. And instead of living like a bohemian, she was a straight-A student, got into Smith on a scholarship and won all the prizes for writing contests. She was beautiful and outgoing, and she wrote cheerful letters home to her mother about all her successes.

She went to England on a Fulbright Scholarship, and it was there that she met her future husband, the poet Ted Hughes. She spent the years of their marriage helping support his career typing his manuscripts and writing letters to editors for him. He encouraged her to write her own poetry, but she didn't have much time after caring for the children and working part-time as a teacher. When she published her first book of poems, The Colossus (1960), it got mixed reviews, and she fell into despair at the idea that she would never amount to anything.

Plath's marriage with Hughes broke up in 1962. Living alone with her two children, she began to wake up every morning at 4:00 AM and write until the children woke up. She'd always been a slow, painstaking writer, but in the fall of 1962 she developed a kind of nursery rhyme style, finishing one or two poems every day.

At the end of October, during which she had finished thirty new poems, she wrote to her mother, "I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name." But when Plath sent her new poems out for publication, but the editors of various magazines rejected them as too strange and disturbing.

That winter in England was one of the coldest on record, and Plath spent the coldest days cooped up in the house with her children, suffering from a fever. On the morning of February 11, she committed suicide.

A collection of her late poems, including "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," was published as Ariel in 1965, and it became the model for a new kind of confessional poetry. When her Collected Poems was published in 1981, it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Sylvia Plath said, "Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."



Stillborn


These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air --
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.