INTRODUCTION TO SYLVIA PLATH
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, had emigrated to the United States from Poland and was an internationally known authority on bees; a distinguished professor of biology at Boston University, he also taught German and was recognized for his work in ornithology, entomology, and ichthyology. Aurelia Schober, the poetâs mother, was of Austrian descent and met her husband while working toward her masterâs degree in German.
CHILDHOOD
The Plaths lived in Winthrop, a seaside town near Boston, and Sylviaâs early years were influenced by the oceanâs proximity. She later wrote, from the perspective of adulthood, âMy childhood landscape was not land but the end of land-the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.â (âOcean 1212-W,â the Listener no. 70, Aug. 29, 1963). Her maternal grandparents lived nearby, and for two and a half years Sylvia was the center of a âtender universeâ bordered by the ocean on one side, the Massachusetts Bay on the other. Then, in 1935, her brother Warren was born, and consciousness of her separateness was thrust upon her. âMy beautiful fusion with things of this world was over. . . . On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else.â Still, for five and a half years she continued with her family to live happily by the sea believing ânot in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids.â
When in 1940 Otto Plath died, after a long illness, the family moved inland to Wellesley, an upper middle-class suburb of Boston. Mrs. Plath went to work, teaching in a medical-secretarial program at Boston University; Mr. Schober took a job as maitre dâ hotel at the Brookline Country Club; Mrs. Schober ran the household.
EDUCATION
Sylvia and her brother Warren attended the local public schools which, she later wrote, were âgenuinely public. Everyone went.â From the start she was an âAâ student and began, early on, to win prizes for her poems and pen-and-ink drawings. Right through high school, she achieved top recognition, in both scholastic and social activities.
FIRST PUBLICATIONS
As Sylvia reached adolescence, she took her writing more and more seriously. By 1950 she had developed enough discipline and control to earn publication in Seventeen. After forty-five previous submissions, the magazine finally accepted âAnd Summer Will Not Come Again.â Shortly after, the Christian Science Monitor printed her poem âBitter Strawberries.â
COLLEGE
She entered Smith College in 1950 on a scholarship endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of Stella Dallas and later a friend and patron. As usual Sylvia was a successful student and participated in a variety of extra curricular activities, from weekends at menâs colleges to a position on the disciplinary Honor Board. Continuing to publish stories and poems in Seventeen, she wrote poetry on a rigid schedule and kept a detailed journal and scrapbook. Prizes and awards also began coming in. In 1951 she won Mademoiselleâs fiction contest with her story âSunday at the Mintons.â The next year, her junior year, she won two Smith poetry prizes, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Alpha (Smithâs honorary society for the arts), and was selected as a guest editor in Mademoiselleâs College Board Contest. (The issue on which she participated published her âfavorite Villanelle,â âMad Girlâs Lovesong.â) Also at this time came her âfirst professional earnings,â one hundred dollars from Harperâs for three poems.
BREAKDOWN
This period of glittering recognition and achievement, however, could not forestall the blanket of desperation that had been gradually creeping upon her. Her attempted suicide and subsequent hospitalization for electric shock treatment and psychotherapy were widely publicized at the time and provide the basis of her novel, The Bell Jar (1963). She later described this six-month period during the summer and fall of 1953 as âa time of darkness, despair, disillusionment-so black only as the inferno of the human mind can be-symbolic death, and numb shock-then the painful agony of slow rebirth and psychic regeneration.â
HONORS
When she returned to Smith, she resumed her norm of academic accomplishment. During the summer of 1954 she attended Harvard, taking courses in German, creative writing with Alfred Kazin, and special studies in writing with Alfred Fisher. After a year of more prizes and published poems and the completion of an honors thesis on the double personality in Dostoyevski, she was graduated from Smith in 1955, summa cum laude.
MARRIAGE
Then came a Fulbright to Newnham College at Cambridge. There she met the young English poet Ted Hughes, âthe only man Iâve ever met whom I could never boss.â They were married in 1956 on âBlooms-day,â June 16 (the day on which James Joyceâs Ulysses takes place). The following year the Hugheses moved to the United States, where Plath taught for a time at Smith. Her colleagues there appraised her as âone of the two or three finest instructors ever to appear in the English department at Smith College.â But because the rigorous teaching schedule interfered with her writing, she decided to abandon her academic plans. She and Hughes moved to Boston, where they lived for a year âon a shoe-string.â She audited Robert Lowellâs poetry course at Boston University, where she became acquainted with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, two other young poets.
LIFE IN ENGLAND
With repeated rejections of Plathâs book of poems by American publishers, they decided to return to England. There, in 1960, their first child, Frieda, was born, and The Colossus was accepted for publication by William Heinemann, Ltd. Then, always suffering now with sinus disorders, Plathâs health endured additional setback with a miscarriage and an appendectomy within a short time of each other. Fortunately, in 1961 she was awarded a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, which she had been refused in 1958. She was thus freed to work on her novel, which she wrote according to a precise timetable.
The Hugheses moved to Devon to live in a thatched country house and had a son, Nicholas, in 1962. The Bell Jar was punctually finished and the Ariel poems begun. After a vacation in Ireland, Plath and Hughes decided to separate for a time because her health, in a poor state again, couldnât withstand a second country winter. So she moved with her children to a flat in a London house, which âby a small miracle,â W.B. Yeats had lived in.
SUICIDE
In 1963 The Bell Jar appeared under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because she was in doubt of the bookâs seriousness. It was, she said, âan autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.â Then, as the winter set in, it proved to be the coldest in fifty years. Fighting against household inconveniences and continuing poor health, she began to turn out poems at an extraordinary rate, writing in the pre-dawn hours before the children awoke. In a depression serious enough to send her to a doctor but self-controlled enough to be overlooked by friends, Sylvia Plath, in the midst of her most poetically productive period, ended her own life on February 11, 1963.
POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS
Ted Hughes had Ariel published in 1965. In 1966, The Bell Jar was reissued by Faber and Faber, this time under Plathâs own name; and in 1967 The Colossus reappeared. The New York editions of these books were: The Colossus (1962); Ariel (1966); The Bell Jar (1971). Then, the previously uncollected poems were published in Crossing the Water (1971) and Winter Trees (1972).
THE POET REMEMBERED
Sylvia Plath has been remembered âas vigorous, efficient, professional, and ambitious. Her social manner was poised and warmâ (Lois Ames, âNotes Toward a Biography,â The Art of Sylvia Plath. Charles Newman, ed. 1970). She had âa long, rather flat body, a longish face, not pretty but alert and full of feeling, with a lively mouth and fine brown eyesâ (A. Alvarez, The Savage God, 1972). Some thought her âa remarkably attractive young woman. She was impressively tall, almost statuesque.... Her eyes were very dark, deeply set under heavy lids that give them a brooding quality in many of her photographsâ (Nancy Hunter Steiner, A Closer Look at Ariel, 1973). And Ted Hughes has said, âIn spite of the prevailing doom evident in her poems, it is impossible that anybody could have been more in love with life, or more capable of happiness, than she wasâ (Encounter 21, no. 4).
A REVIEW OF PLATH CRITICISM
For several years criticism of Sylvia Plathâs poetry was almost exclusively biographical. Because the sources of her poems appear blatantly autobiographical and her images and symbols undeniably derived from the facts of her life, she has been labeled a confessional poet. Her work has been viewed as an expression of very real, personal feelings and circumstances, as the moving record of a deeply troubled mind. The occasion of her suicide reinforced this view, while calling additional attention to the correspondence between her poetry and life. As a result a division emerged among critics, reviewers and, consequently, readers who either praised her books enthusiastically, and rather uncritically, as âthe genuine article,â a true confession; or dismissed it as the indulgence of wholly private emotions. Only very recently have critics begun to view her poetry as craft, as subject for close analysis and explication. Finally her autobiographical side, including her death, is being taken for granted, and other poetic elements studied. In the past few years, in fact, essays have appeared refuting Plathâs classification as a confessional poet; once looked at critically, in terms of image, meter, voice, etc., her poetry can be seen for what it is in itself: skillful creations that happen to employ, and transform, biographical materials in the process of becoming works of art.
REMINISCENCES
Reminiscences and biographical notes began appearing in periodicals not long after Sylvia Plathâs death in 1963. For example, the November 1966 Glamour Magazine published an article by Elinor Klein entitled âA Friend Recalls Sylvia Plath.â Lois Ames, a high school and college acquaintance of Plathâs, has written two thorough biographical notes, one published in Tri-Quarterly no. 7 (Fall 1966), the other in the Harper and Row edition of The Bell Jar (New York, 1971). Articles such as these, while substantiating the âSylvia Plath legendâ and fixing attention on the poet rather than the poetry, do not attempt to critically evaluate the poems either in their own right or in terms of biographical criticism.
As late as 1973 interest in piecing together her art and her life was renewed by the publication of Nancy Hunter Steinerâs A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath (New York: Harperâs Magazine Press). This book takes up, in a sense, where The Bell Jar left off and discusses the period in the poetâs life immediately following her first suicide attempt in 1953, from the time she returned to Smith College after her hospitalization to the time she was graduated. As Plathâs roommate and close friend, Mrs. Steiner was present during many of the events that were later incorporated into The Bell Jar, and her very different perspective helps to distinguish between fact and fiction, to establish just where in Plathâs novel art and autobiography merge. But Mrs. Steiner also contributes to the legend, for she discloses those intimacies, eccentricities, and obsessions that only a roommate could be aware of and only a biographical critic could make use of in a reading of the poetry.
GEORGE STADE
George Stade, who wrote the introduction to Mrs. Steinerâs book, is such a biographical critic. His major concern is âthe image of the poet that rises out of the poetry as we read itâ and the reconciliation of this image with the quite different one in the memoirs of her friends. He neither looks at her life in order to understand her poetry nor studies the poetry in order to learn about her life, but rather considers the poetry itself as a biographical fact - with autobiographical sources - that can in turn shed light on the poetâs psychological condition. Thus he will point out some aspect of the poetry - for example, the recurring image of âOpposed Selves,â a deep-set violent disturbance vs. a formal superficial containment (an idea discussed more closely by other critics) - only to use such insights to suggest the poetâs apparent schizophrenia. He acknowledges her use of personae (poetic voices, or first-person narrators, that are imagined or fictitious speakers distinct from and not to be confused with the poetâs own voice or personality) and remarks how they shift, not only from poem to poem, but within individual poems as well; but he ultimately opts for the âpersonal reference and sourceâ in her work and devotes nineteen pages to recounting her biography, illustrated with fragments of poems to underline the relationship.
A. ALVAREZ
A. Alvarez met Sylvia Plath in 1960, shortly before The Colossus appeared but after heâd already read some of her poems in his capacity as poetry critic for The Observer in London. Thus, perhaps inevitably, he approaches her art in the light of her personality as he knew it. His two major pieces on her work are âSylvia Plathâ in Tri-Quarterly No. 7 (Fall, 1966; later reprinted, along with much of this issue, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, 1970) and the prologue to The Savage God (New York: Random House, 1972). In these essays he wrestles with the difficulty of responding to her poems for what they are, independent artistic creations, because of the role they played in her own life, i.e., a means of keeping âthe disturbance, out of which she made her art, at a distance.â
Alvarez is careful to distinguish where he is concerned with her poetry from where he is concerned with Plath as a case history. As a âpoet in extremisâ or an extremist poet, as he calls her, she strives âto make poetry and death inseparable.â This does not mean that suicide is inevitable for such a poet, not that it is a necessary validation of her work. Rather, extremist poets, Sylvia Plath among them, run a great risk in confronting the depths of their emotions, pain, awareness of mortality, etc. In articulating her vision, or consciousness, of life/death, she brought herself closer to the object of that vision, to a release into death. But by transforming private suffering into poetry it takes on a general meaning, an objectivity even, that removes the poem from the private pain out of which it sprung. Thus Alvarez insists that her images are not obscure personal references; the reasons for them âare always there, though sometimes you have to work hard to find them.â
In The Savage God he explores more particu...