This month we are celebrating the birthday of the exceptional American poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath. Plath is credited with advancing the confessional poetry genre. In 1982, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Collected Poems (published in 1981). She is the fourth person to receive this honor posthumously.
She was born October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, and she died by suicide on February 11, 1963, in London, England.
Plath’s father, Otto Plath, was an entomologist and professor of biology at Boston University. Shortly after a close friend’s death from lung cancer, Otto became convinced that his own health problems stemmed from lung cancer, and he did not seek treatment. He died when Plath was eight years old from complications from surgery to treat advanced diabetes. After his death, Plath’s mother moved the family to Wellesley, Massachusetts. Plath would later note that her childhood could be delineated by this move. It separated her life before losing her father, from the grief which marked the rest of her childhood.
Plath had an IQ of 160. She was a perfectionist who excelled at school. Her first poem was published in the Boston Herald’s children section when she was eight. When she was eleven, she began keeping a journal. Plath was also a promising artist who won awards Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for her paintings during her high school years. Soon after graduating from high school one of her works was published nationally in the Christian Science Monitor. Smith had authored over fifty short stories, many published in national magazines before she started college.
She attended Smith College, a private liberal arts college for women in Massachusetts where she edited The Smith Review and became a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine at their New York City headquarters. Plath wasn’t pleased with the month she spent at the magazine, and was bitterly disappointed when she was not invited to attend an editor’s meeting with one of her favorite poets, Dylan Thomas. After learning where Thomas was staying, she attempted to meet him only to learn he’d returned to Wales. A few weeks later, Plath was not accepted into a Harvard University writing seminar. In reaction to a crippling sense of depression, she slashed her legs in what she described as “an attempt to see if she had the courage to kill herself.” Plath was treated with ECT, electroconvulsive therapy for depression.
On August 14, 1953, Plath made her first suicide attempt. After hiding under the front porch of her family home, she took and overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills. After this unsuccessful attempt to take her own life, Plath spent six months in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital. Her care and her Smith scholarship during this time were paid for by author Alice Higgins Prouty who also faced mental health issues and had recovered from a mental breakdown. Prouty blamed the doctor who performed Plath’s previous ECT treatments of mismanagement of care leading to the suicide attempt. Plath received additional electric and insulin shock therapy treatments at McLean under the care of Ruth Beuscher, an American psychiatrist, theologian, and Episcopal priest.
Plath seemed to make a complete recovery graduating summa cum laude from Smith with an A.B. in English. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society. She also obtained a Fullbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge in England. She wrote for Varsity, a magazine published by the university.
Plath met the English poet, Ted Hughes in 1956. They were married four months later. According to Hughes, Plath did not disclose her struggles with depression before they married. The couple honeymooned in Europe and encouraged each other’s writing. In October, Plath resumed her studies at Newnham. Initially, their marriage was happy.
The following year, they moved to the United States when Plath was offered a teaching position at her alma mater, Smith College. Hughes taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Plath complained that her work left little time for writing, so in 1958, they moved to Boston. Plath became a receptionist at Massachusetts General Hospital and attended writing seminars in the evenings. Plath resumed psychoanalytic therapy in December under the care of Beuscher.
In December 1959, Plath and Hughes returned to London, England. Their daughter Freida was born in April,1960, and in October, Plath published The Colossus, her first anthology of poems.
Plath suffered a miscarriage in February 1961 during her second pregnancy. Several of her poems, including “Parliament Hill Fields” were about her miscarriage. In a letter to her therapist, Plath accused Hughes of beating her two days before her miscarriage. Hughes denied these allegations all his life.
In August 1961, Plath completed her semi-biographical novel, The Bell Jar. Her mother wanted to block its publication, but it was eventually published in the U.K. in 1963 and in the United States in 1971. Aso in 1961, Hughes and Plath moved with Freida to Court Green and rented their previous flat to Assia and David Wevill. Hughes was immediately captivated by Assia.
In January 1962, Plath gave birth to their son, Nicholas. In June, Path had a car accident which she later alleged was her second suicide attempt. It’s possible that Plath struggled with post-partum depression after Nicholas’ birth. It didn’t help that she discovered Hughes was having an affair with Assia Wevill a month after her accident.
The couple separated and Plath rented a nearby flat formerly lived in by William Butler Yeats. Plath considered this a good omen, but she didn’t plan for the rough winter ahead. It was one of the coldest on record in London, the pipes froze, and her young children were frequently ill. Plath suffered from insomnia and unrelenting suicidal thoughts. She lost over twenty pounds and began having difficulty working. Caring for the children was her first priority and her greatest fear as she struggled to cope with daily life. She took great pains to disguise her depression to the outside world meticulously maintaining her physical appearance and her outward demeanor.
Plath did confide in her general practitioner, Dr. Horder, who prescribed an anti-depressant. He encouraged her to seek in-patient care. When she refused, he arranged for a live-in nurse to help care for Plath and her two young children. Hughes maintained that the anti-depressant Dr. Horder prescribed was a key factor in her death by suicide. Previously in the United States, Plath had an adverse reaction to the drug which had a different name in the U.K. Hughes maintained that the new doctor erred in prescribing it to Plath. An adverse reaction would have been immediate even though anti-depressants can take several weeks to take effect.
On February 11, 1963, the live-in nurse who was scheduled to arrive at 9 a.m. to help care for the children, arrived to find the doors locked. She eventually gained access to the home with help from a tradesman working nearby. The oven pilot light was out, and the gas was on. Plath’s head was in the oven. She had sealed up her children’s rooms and any rooms between theirs and the kitchen tightly with tape, towels, and cloth to make sure they would be safe from the gas.
Plath died of carbon monoxide poisoning at thirty years old. The gas seeped into a flat downstairs and incapacitated a neighbor, but he survived. Plath had left a note on the neighbor’s door asking him to call Dr. Horder, but he was rendered unconscious before he saw it. Theories swirled around that Plath hadn’t meant to kill herself, but her timing was off and the people she believed would find her in time didn’t appear. Others claimed that she had shoved her head so far into the oven that she was definitely intent on taking her own life. Hughes was devastated and certain Plath meant to take her own life.
Six years later Assia Wevill took her life and the life of the child she shared with Hughes using a gas stove.
Hughes selected the quote, “Even amidst fierce flames the golden lotus can be planted,” for Plath’s gravestone. The source of the quote is believed to be from the Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita or a 16th century Buddhist novel by Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West.
Plath’s friend and fellow poet Anne Sexton admitted they spoke often of suicide and past attempts. Critics were quick to paint Plath as a poet indulging in melodrama for attention, but her work has outlasted any attempts to dismiss it’s significance.
As her husband, Hughes was awarded complete control of her body of work even though they were separated at the time of her death. Hughes served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his death in 1998. Critics consider him one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, so Plath’s works were left in capable hands.
Plath was working on Double Exposure in 1963. It was never published. According to Hughes, Plath hadn’t completed enough of it to justify publication after her death.
Ariel was published posthumously in 1965. The poems were more personal and elevated her popularity and standing in the literary community. In 2004, The Independent, a London newspaper published an article ranking Ariel as the third best book of modern poetry among “The 10 Best Modern Poetry Books.”
In 1971, the volumes Winter Trees and Crossing the Water were published in the U.K. containing nine previously unpublished poems from the first draft of Ariel.
In In 1982, Hughes published her adult diaries starting from her years at Smith College. He retained two of her journals to be released in 2013, exactly fifty years after her death. Her childhood diaries were never published. Most of her journals are kept at Smith College.
Plath’s daughter Freida Hughes is an English Australian poet and artist. After many years of struggling with depression Plath’s son Nicholas died by suicide at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska on March 16, 2009.
In addition to poems, short stories, essays, and articled published during her life, Plath’s major works are:
Poetry Collections:
The Colossus and other Poems (1960)
Ariel (1965)
Three Woman: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968)
Crossing the Water (1971)
Winter Trees (1971)
The Collected Poems (19810
Selected Poems (1985)
Collected Prose and Novels:
The Bell Jar (written under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas)
Letter Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 (1975)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Entries (1977)
The Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCollough (1982)
The Magic Mirror (1989)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000)
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1 (2017) and The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2 (2018) Both works edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom (2019)
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg (2024)
Children’s books:
The Bed book (1976)
The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit (1996)
Mrs. Cherry’s Kitchen (2001)
Collected Children’s Stories (20010