"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
-- Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath, pseudonym Victoria Lucas, was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. She was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death in 1963.
"Even in her youth, Plath was ambitiously driven to succeed." While living in Winthrop, eight-year-old Plath published her first poem in the Boston Herald's children's section. Over the next few years, Plath published multiple poems in regional magazines and newspapers. In addition to writing, she showed early promise as an artist, winning an award for her paintings from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in 1947.
In 1950, Plath attended Smith College, a private women's liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She excelled academically. After her third year of college, Plath was awarded a coveted position as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine, during which she spent a month in New York City. The experience was not what she had hoped for, and many of the events that took place during that summer were later used as inspiration for her novel The Bell Jar. In January 1955, she submitted her thesis, The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoyevsky's Novels, and in June graduated from Smith with an A.B. summa cum laude. She obtained a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, one of the two women-only colleges of the University of Cambridge in England, where she continued actively writing poetry and publishing her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham, she studied with Dorothea Krook, whom she held in high regard.
Plath first met poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, while the couple married on June 16 the same year. Plath and Hughes traveled across Canada and the United States, staying at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York in late 1959. Plath says that it was here that she learned "to be true to my own weirdnesses", but she remained anxious about writing confessionally, from deeply personal and private material. Beginning in October 1962, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests, writing at least 26 of the poems of her posthumous collection Ariel during the final months of her life.
Sylvia Plath's work as a poet and expansion on the style of confessional poetry led her to become a major part of American literature. The ways Plath highlighted the injustices of sex-based roles and psychiatric care make her important to all of American history. Often, her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.
Although only Colossus was published while she was alive, Plath was a prolific poet, and in addition to Ariel, Hughes published three other volumes of her work posthumously, including The Collected Poems, which was the recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. She was the first poet to posthumously win a Pulitzer Prize.
After battling with clinical depression and many past suicide attempts, Plath killed herself at the age of 30 in her London home on Feb. 11, 1963.
Discussion Questions:
1:- Have you read any of the works by Sylvia Plath? What are your views about the strong imagery & the bold style of writing that her poems reflect?
2:- Sylvia is said to be a prominent literary figure who changed the shape of poetic society. Discuss your thoughts about the same.
Always open to additional questions and comments about Sylvia Plath and her works.
If there is another author you would like to see a discussion on, please post your suggestion in the comments below to have a chance of being featured in a future chapter.
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