Sylvia Plath(1932 — 1963)
Sylvia Plath
États-Unis
9 min read
American poet and novelist (1932–1963), a major figure in confessional poetry. Author of The Bell Jar and the collection Ariel, she explores with striking intensity the themes of female identity, psychological suffering, and literary creation.
Famous Quotes
« I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am. »
« Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. »
Key Facts
- Born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a family of German and Austrian descent
- Won a scholarship to Smith College, then studied at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship (1955–1957)
- Published The Bell Jar in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas
- Died on February 11, 1963, in London, at the age of 30
- Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously in 1982 for her Collected Poems
Works & Achievements
Her first poetry collection published during her lifetime, in the United Kingdom. It already reveals her formal mastery and her obsessive themes: death, the mourning of her father, nature, and the construction of female identity.
An autobiographical novel published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas just weeks before her death. It tells the story of a brilliant young woman's depression and hospitalization in 1950s America, and has since become a founding text of women's literature.
A collection of poems composed in the final months of her life, considered her masterpiece. Its confessional poetry, of shattering intensity, made her an icon of modern literature and second-wave feminism.
A collection of poems written between The Colossus and Ariel, revealing a crucial period of creative transition. It allows readers to trace Plath's evolution toward an increasingly visceral and personal style of writing.
Letters to her mother Aurelia Plath, presenting Sylvia's bright and enthusiastic public face — in striking contrast with the suffering revealed in her private journals and most intense poems.
Diaries kept from 1950 to 1962, an essential primary source for understanding her inner life, her literary ambitions, and the tensions between her dazzling public persona and her profound psychological distress.
Anecdotes
Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight in a Boston newspaper, the Boston Herald, in 1940. From childhood, she showed an extraordinary aptitude for writing and won numerous school prizes, reflecting an early and all-consuming literary ambition.
In 1953, after being rejected from a summer creative writing course at Harvard, Plath fell into a severe depression and attempted to take her own life by swallowing sleeping pills. She was found alive several days later and hospitalized, receiving electroshock treatments. This traumatic experience formed the autobiographical core of her novel The Bell Jar.
At a student party in Cambridge in February 1956, Sylvia Plath met the British poet Ted Hughes. According to accounts from the time, their first encounter was electric and tumultuous. They married four months later, in June 1956, forming one of the most celebrated literary couples of the twentieth century.
In the autumn of 1962, separated from Ted Hughes who had left her for another woman, Plath experienced a period of exceptional creativity. She would wake at four in the morning, before her two young children stirred, to write her poems. In just a matter of weeks, she composed nearly all the texts that would make up the collection Ariel, which would become her masterpiece.
Sylvia Plath moved with her children into a London apartment that had once belonged to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, at 23 Fitzroy Road. She regarded this as a favorable literary omen and rejoiced at the symbolic coincidence in her final letters to her mother, shortly before her death in February 1963.
Primary Sources
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.
I want to write because I have a thirst for excellence — an ardent desire to give and to create — and I am terribly jealous of anyone who writes better than I do. I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible.
I am so happy here, so full of work and new ambitions. Cambridge is a magical place, full of brilliant young people and heated discussions. I feel I am building myself a whole life.
Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you. You stand erect like a man of God, your chin unworthy, your Aryan moustache, your Aryan eye bright blue.
Key Places
Birthplace of Sylvia Plath, born on October 27, 1932. Her childhood in the Boston suburbs shaped her earliest experiences of postwar American life, caught between academic ambition and social conformity.
Plath attended on a full scholarship (1950–1955). It was here that she suffered her first serious depression and first hospitalization, an experience that lies at the heart of *The Bell Jar*.
On a Fulbright scholarship, Plath studied literature at Cambridge from 1955 to 1957. There she met Ted Hughes and flourished intellectually in one of England's most stimulating academic environments.
A large country house where Plath and Ted Hughes lived from 1961 to 1962. It was here that she kept beehives and wrote many of the poems in *Ariel*, before the couple's painful separation.
Plath's final home, where she moved in the winter of 1962–1963 with her two children. The flat had once belonged to W. B. Yeats, which Plath took as a sign. It was here that she died on February 11, 1963.