27th October marks what would’ve been the 88th birthday of American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, whose life and poetry have become inextricably linked to the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s. Her life was followed closely by media attention, including her marriage and separation from British poet Ted Hughes, as well as her suicide in 1963. She is best known for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, as well as the collection of poetry published posthumously by her former husband, known as Ariel, all of which survive her.
Sylvia Plath started writing poetry at the age of 5 and was first published at 8 years old in the Boston Herald’s children section. In 1950, she attended Smith College and was awarded an internship at Mademoiselle Magazine in her third year. This would later act as the inspiration behind the plot of The Bell Jar. At this time, she was first diagnosed with clinical depression.
Plath first met Ted Hughes in February 1956 when she was studying in Cambridge and married four months later in London. They moved to the United States where Plath was able to work with poets such as Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Here, Plath’s poetry took a more personal turn and she was encouraged to write from a more female perspective. In 1960, her first child, Frieda Hughes, was born, and Sylvia Plath published her first poetry collection, Colossus.
In February 1961, Plath suffered a miscarriage, and in a letter to her therapist, she reveals that Hughes had beat her two days prior. Their second child, Nicholas, was born in January 1962. However, in July 1962, Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill was discovered and the couple separated.
In October 1962, Plath experienced an unprecedented burst of creativity, with her waking in the morning at 4am to write poetry before her children had begun to wake up. She wrote at least 26 of the poems in Ariel in the months leading up to her death. Ariel is what precipitated Sylvia Plath’s rise to fame and is a proponent piece of confessional poetry. Published in 1966, it was lauded for her representation of mental illness in poems such as Tulips, Daddy and Lazy Lazarus, the last of which details her suicide attempts. Sylvia Plath was the first writer to be posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. According to critic Katha Pollitt, "by the time she came to write her last seventy or eighty poems, there was no other voice like hers on earth".
Whilst Plath died in 1963, she is survived by a generation of poetry, as well as fans that exalted her craft of verse. As well as her own poetry, she had a major impact on the work of Ted Hughes, their marriage being a major point of discussion in his final collection, Birthday Letters. In addition to this, her daughter, Frieda Hughes, is also a poet.
