Poets and Poems

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath suffered from bouts of depression all her adult life, but the poems that came out of her illness are among the most powerful ever written.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in October 1932, the eldest child of Otto and Aurelia Plath.* She was educated at a public (state) school in Winthorp MA, Bradford Senior High School in Wellesley, and Smith College in Northampton, where she graduated in 1950 with honours in English. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University, England, on a Fulbright scholarship.

Her father's death in November 1940, a week after her eight birthday, left the young girl with many serious unresolved psychological problems. She attempted suicide several times during her life, the first being in 1953. Her poem 'Lady Lazarus' was written in 1962 shortly before her death, after what she said was her third attempt.

In Cambridge, at a party in February 1956, Sylvia met the English poet Ted Hughes and they married that June. Early the following year they moved together to the United States. In the autumn of 1957 she was back at Smith College, now teaching, until moving to Boston the following summer. In December 1959 they returned to England, after an extended period of travel in the USA and Canada. Their daughter Frieda (1960) was born in London and their son Nicholas (1962) in North Tawton in Devon, where they moved to in the autumn of 1961. Her first collection of poetry, The Colossus (1960) was published during these years.

In July 1962 Sylvia discovered that Ted had been having an affair, and in September the couple separated. Her posthumously published book of poems, Ariel, which contains many of those on which her reputation is based, was written in the months that followed their separation. Her poem 'Daddy' is a brutal expression of resentment against both her father and her husband.

In December she returned to London with her two children and rented a house where William Butler Yeats had once lived**. Her depression returned and in February 1963, five months after she had separated from her husband, she ended her life by closing the windows and doors of the room and turning on the gas.

* Otto was a German immigrant and Aurelia was of Austrian descent. The family moved from Boston to the seaside town of Winthorp when Sylvia was three, and in 1942 to Wellesley where her widowed mother had obtained a teaching post.
** Like Yeats and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees, Sylvia and Ted Plath were fascinated by the supernatural.

Lines from 'Daddy'

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

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.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two——
.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.