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259 SYLVIA PLATH 1932–1963 Sylvia plath wrote poems with meticulous care and blazing intensity. She channeled into her poetry all of her personal anguish and fierceness as well as the political opposition to war, injustice, and iniquitous gender roles that was circulating through segments of Anglo-American culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She pioneered a new, more assertive and explicit voice for women poets. Her brief career as a poet, foreshortened by her suicide at the age of thirty, showed just how close to the bone poetry could get. Plath’s poetry laid bare private wounds and desires, brought public traumas up close and personal, and subtly explored the powers and limits of language. By revealing the Shakespearean complexities and intensities of contemporary life, Plath exposed raw nerves in many readers and in society. Poetry has never been quite the same. Plath was born in Boston in 1932, the first child of Otto Plath (a professor of zoology) and Aurelia Plath (a well-educated homemaker). Plath’s father, a German immigrant, was consumed with his work, giving his wife and children little time and attention. Plath’s mother, the daughter of Austrian immigrants, provided an enriched, if highly controlled, intellectual environment for Sylvia and her younger brother, Warren. Otto Plath died from the effects of untreated diabetes when Sylvia was eight. This loss of an already somewhat absent father was devastating to his daughter. She was later to compose some of her most famous poems about him, such as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” After his death, Aurelia Plath went to work as an instructor of secretarial skills, ultimately teaching at Boston University, where her husband had taught. Sylvia Plath’s mixed feelings toward her mother resonate in such poems as “The Disquieting Muses” and “Medusa.” Plath’s poetry registers the impact of her interrupted childhood at every stage of her career. Encouraged by her mother, Plath became a stellar student. After graduating from Wellesley High School, she attended Smith College on full scholarship. Graduating from Smith summa cum laude, she won a scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England, where she received a master’s in English literature . Yet despite her academic success, Plath’s personal life was troubled. At the age of twenty, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills—an event reflected in her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Institutionalized at McLean Hospital, she received excellent psychiatric care from Dr. Ruth Beuscher and made a quick recovery. But her problems with bipolar mood disorder had only begun, and they would not end until her death ten years later. Ø Sylvia Plath 260 At Cambridge, Plath met the young English poet Ted Hughes, whom she married after a whirlwind courtship in 1956. The couple moved to the United States, where Plath took a creative writing class from Robert Lowell, who was just then making his “breakthrough” into a more personal style of poetry. Among the other students in the class was the autobiographical poet Anne Sexton, who was to become a close friend. (Both Lowell and Sexton are included in this anthology .) Plath and Hughes returned to England in 1959. The next year saw the birth of their first child, a daughter named Frieda (now a poet herself), and the publication of Plath’s first book of poetry. In 1961 Plath and Hughes moved to a country home in Devon. Cold (the house was unheated) and exhausted, Plath spent the year writing poems and The Bell Jar. Early in 1962 Plath’s son, Nicholas, was born. Soon thereafter, Plath discovered that her husband was having an affair. After a heated confrontation, he left her, and she moved back to London with her children. She sought to support herself through writing, supplemented by gifts from her mother. Emotionally devastated and physically ill, she composed the poems that ultimately brought her great fame. In October 1962, the month of her thirtieth birthday, she experienced a creative frenzy, writing “Daddy,” “Medusa,” “The Jailer,” and “Lady Lazarus.” Sophisticated yet primitive, “Daddy” instantly became the apex of the “confessional” movement that Robert Lowell had spawned. It is one of the most powerful and oft-cited poems of the century. Four days later Plath composed a companion piece about a mother-figure, “Medusa,” and one day after that she completed her family trilogy by composing a poem about a husband called “The Jailer.” “Lady Lazarus,” written a few days later, returns to the scene of...

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