Sylvia   Path

Life

Sylvia Plath was born on the 27October  1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (a

historic neighborhood in Boston) to Aurelia Schober Plath, a first-generation American

of Austrian descent, and Otto Emile Plath, an emigrant from Grabow, Germany and a

professor at Boston University. Otto's specialty was entomology, and he was a noted

authority on bees. Aurelia was approximately twenty-one years younger than her

husband.

Plath's early childhood was spent in Winthrop, Massachusetts. The Plath family moved

to Winthrop in 1936 during the Great Depression. Plath's mother, Aurelia, had grown up

there, and her maternal grandparents, the Schobers, lived on Point Shirley, a section of

the small town. It was here that Plath had her first poem published, in the Boston

Herald’s

children's section, when she was eight years old. Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940,

a week and a half after Plath's eighth birthday, of complications following the

amputation of a leg due to diabetes. Otto Plath ultimately died of diabetes mellitus,

which at that time was a very treatable disease. Otto Plath however, did not receive

proper treatment due to a wrongful personal diagnosis. Otto fell ill shortly after the

death of a close friend due to lung cancer. Comparing the similarities between his

friends' symptoms and his own, Otto was convinced that he too was ill with lung cancer,

and did not seek treatment until the illness had progressed too far. Aurelia Plath then

moved her children and her parents to 26 Elmwood Road,Wellesley, Massachusetts in

1942.

In her junior year at Smith College, Plath made the first of her suicide attempts by

crawling under her house and taking an overdose of sleeping pills. She later included

details of her attempted suicide in the autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. After her

suicide attempt, Plath was briefly committed to a mental institution, McLean Hospital;

her stay there was paid for by Olive Higgins Prouty, who had also funded the

scholarship at Smith of which Plath was the recipient. Plath seemed to make an

acceptable recovery and graduated from Smith with honors in 1955. She obtained a

Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University where she continued actively writing

poetry, occasionally publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. It was at

Cambridge that she met English poet Ted Hughes. They were married on June 16, 1956.

Plath and Hughes spent from July 1957 to October 1959 living and working in the

United States, where Plath taught at Smith. They then moved to Boston where Plath sat

in on seminars given by Robert Lowell. Also attending Lowell's seminars was .Anne Saxton. At this

time, Plath and Hughes also met, for the first time, W. S. Merwin, who admired their

work and was to remain a lifelong friend.

Upon learning that Plath was pregnant, the couple moved back to the United Kingdom.

Plath and Hughes lived in London for a while on Chalcot Square near the Primrose Hill

area of Regent's Park, and then settled in the small market town of North Tawton in

Devon. While there, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. In

February 1961, she suffered a miscarriage, and a number of her poems address this

event.

Soon, Plath's marriage to Hughes met with many difficulties (particularly his affair with

Assia Wevill), and they separated. She returned to London with their children, Frieda

and Nicholas, and rented a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road (only a few blocks from the Chalcot

Square apartment) in a house where W.B. Yeats once lived. Plath was pleased by this

fact and considered it a good omen.

(cf.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath)

 Death

Plath's grave at Heptonstall church, West Yorkshire

Sylvia Plath took her own life on the morning of February 11, 1963. She left out bread

and milk and completely sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children

with "wet towels and cloths." Plath then placed her head in the oven in her kitchen

while the gas was turned on.

It has been suggested that Plath's timing and planning of this suicide attempt was too

precise, too coincidental, and that she had not meant to succeed in killing herself.

Apparently, she had previously asked Mr. Thomas, her downstairs neighbour, what time

he would be leaving, and a note had been placed that read "Call Dr. Horder" and listed

his phone number. Therefore it is argued that Plath must have turned the gas on at a

time when Mr. Thomas should have been waking and beginning his day. This theory

maintains that the gas seeped through the floor and reached Mr. Thomas and another

resident of the floor below for several hours. Also, an au pair girl was to arrive at nine

o'clock that morning to help Plath with the care of her children. Arriving promptly at

nine, the au pair could not get into the flat, but was eventually let in by painters, who

had a key to the front door.

However, in the book Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, Jillian Becker says

that, "according to Mr. Goodchild—a police officer attached to the coroner's office . . .

she had thrust her head far into the gas oven. 'She had really meant to die.'"

Plath's gravestone bears the inscription "Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can

be planted." Following her death, the gravestone was repeatedly vandalized with

supporters of Plath chiselling off the name "Hughes." This practice intensified following

the suicide in 1969 of Assia Wevill, the woman he left Plath for, which led to claims of

domestic violence by Hughes against Plath.

(cf.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath#Death)

Poems

Plath has been criticized for her controversial allusions to the Holocaust, and is known

for her uncanny use of metaphor. Her work has been compared to and associated with

Anne Sexton, W.D. Snodgrass, and other confessional poets.

The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena

of poetry. It is likely that Lowell's poetry—which is often labeled "confessional"—

played a part in this shift; Indeed, in an interview before her death she listed Lowell's

"Life Studies" as an influence. The impact of Ariel was dramatic, with its maudlin

descriptions of mental illness in pseudo-autobiographical poems such as "Daddy" and

"Lady Lazarus".

In 2006, a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University discovered a

previously unpublished sonnet written by Plath entitled "Ennui." The poem, composed

during Plath's early years at Smith College, is published in Blackbird, the online journal.

"Daddy" is perhaps one of Sylvia Path’s well known works.It was written shortly

before her death, and published Ariel in 1965. “Daddy” can be seen  as 

a response to Plath's complex relationship with her father, Otto Path, who died shortly

before her eighth birthday as a result of undiagnosed Diabetes  Mellitus.

The poem  describes the true feelings of Path. She tells the reader  how  her father treated her, she uses metaphor  while doing the descriptions. . Plath compares the wars in Germany with the many conflicts in her life. She  also compares her father with the Germans.

. This poem is  influenced by the death of her father and by the divorce from her husband, about struggles in her life, that she felt was caused by

either her father or her husband. All of these struggles left her with a feeling of

insignificance toward men, primarily her father.

"Daddy" differs from the others in that it shows an attempt to change the situation. Plath

states: "Daddy, I have had to kill you." by this, she of course means her unhealthy

relationship with the memory of her father. The extent to which her father's memory

affected her is obvious especially from the twelfth stanza on. She states

"At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do."

Here Plath refers to an attempted suicide by overdose on sleeping pills, stating that it

was an attempt to get back to her father, to be with him in death.

Then she continues:

"But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do."

The 'man in black with a Meinkampf look' is a reference to her husband, Ted Hughes,

from whom

she had recently separated. She portrays their relationship as a manifestation of her

Electra Complex, that she was attracted to Hughes because he reminded her of her

father. In the next stanza, Plath describes the outcome of this relationship.

"If I've killed one man, I've killed two-
The vamnpire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,"

The two men she refers to are her father and Hughes. Killed here means that she has

moved on, and forgotten about them. Although from the portrayal of both of them as

vampires, it is obvious that this was not done easily, that Plath endured seven years of

marriage to this 'vampire'. But, as she says in the poem "So daddy, I'm finally through."

In stating this she means that she has overcome the memory of her father, and has

moved on.