Sylvia Plath 's Life And Accomplishments

Death plays a huge role in Sylvia Plath’s poetry; she reveals it in different ways. The main common theme is the emptiness gone by her father’s death at the age of eight. She speaks about his death and burial remembering that she is forever separated from the love of her father.

parents, and how she saw herself. Whether Plath wrote about nature or someone else, she

Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus”, was greatly about the author’s life: the influence by her suicide attempts, years of troubled mental health, and stressed relationships with her father and husband.

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are two very alike women. Both were born in Massachusetts, both wrote poetry, and both committed suicide. A common factor that particularly stands out in these two women is that they both suffered some form of mental problem, but they used that to transfer it onto their writing. It was because of their depression that they were able to be so successful in their writing careers. But even after having poems and books published, that wasn’t enough to satisfy their happiness. In the end, they searched for a way out, a way to end their mental suffering. To understand their poetry, we must first understand a little bit about their depression and the lives they lived.

Sylvia Plath was an iconic female author in the literary time period of “The Moderns”. She changed the literary basis with her book The Bell Jar. The source for her inspiration for her books was the very thing that led her to suicide. She used her to depression and pain to create something beautiful, but sinister. Sylvia Plath’s life was tragic in many aspects from her early life to her death, leaving over 230 books and poems.

Sylvia Plath is regarded as one of the best writers in history. She was a very talented poet and also published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. Even though she was successful, her life was full of tragedy. She suffered from mental illness and many personal losses. She used these experience in her work as an outlet for her anguish. She is known as a confessional poet.

Sylvia Plath is a well-known poet, most recognized for her poems concerning men and the role of women as wives, daughters, and mothers. They also address marriage and many other topics. However, these are not the only topics that Sylvia Plath has covered in her career as a poet. Plath also covers the body in a meaningful and thought-provoking way. She often interweaves this topic with many of her common subjects that appear throughout her poetry. However, she most meaningfully ties to the mind in her poems “Cut”, “Contusion”, and “Metaphors”. Plath uses similar styling, language, and vivid imagery to create poetry on three different subjects, all constructing a connection between the body and the mind.

In August 1953, Sylvia won a contest for the Mademoiselle magazine, also winning herself a job as the guest editor for the magazine. During her time in New York she became more depressed with signs of anxiety and bipolar disorder. One day, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. She survived this attempt and was hospitalized, and while there received electroshock therapy. She later published her novel, The Bell Jar, which explains her breakdown and recovery. After fully recovering, she returned to Smith College and finished her degree. She then received a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University in England. While there, she met poet Ted Hughes, and they were married in June 1956. This was the happiest time of her life. She and her husband loved each other dearly, and soon they had two children. They moved back to New York and Sylvia devoted herself to writing poetry. Her poems became personal and dark. She wrote of suicide, death, and the assumption that her father was a Nazi. At the end of 1962, Ted left Sylvia and their two children for another women. This drove Sylvia back into her depressed state. On February 11, 1963, she put out two mugs of milk and a plate of buttered bread for her two children and stuffed a towel under the kitchen door. She then committed suicide by inhaling gas from her kitchen stove (“Sylvia Plath Biography”).

Death plays a huge role in Sylvia Plath’s poetry; she reveals it in different ways. The main common theme is the emptiness gone by her father’s death at the age of eight. She speaks about his death and burial remembering that she is forever separated from the love of her father. As Plath suffered most of her adult life from being depressed, It’s said to be that Sylvia Plath’s

Sylvia Plath is often be described as a feminist poet who wrote about the difficulties women faced before women's right were a mainstream idea. The essayist Thomas McClanahan wrote, “ At her brutal best- and Plath is a brutal poet- she taps a source of power that transformers her poetic voice into a raving avenger of womanhood and innocence”. It is quite obvious that Plath's feminism is extremely important to her poetry, but she also wrote about a lot of day to day experiences and made them significant through her use of metaphors and symbolism. Plath may also be best known for her autobiographical poetry written in confessionalist style that appeared during the 1950s. She is considered an important poet of the post-World War II era. She became widely known following her suicide in 1963.  Through Sylvia Plath’s poetry readers are able to explore her life. The particular time and place in which she wrote her poetry, the death of her father, her failed marriage, her battle with depression and others who influenced her all lead to the writing of some of her most cherished works. By aligning the works of Sylvia Plath alongside the events in her life, one is able to get a better understanding of her work and her as a woman in the era that she lived in.

Having knowledge of the biography of Sylvia Plath helps one to gain a greater understanding of her novel The Bell Jar. Plath was born on October 27, 1932, and died on February 11, 1963 (Greiner 163). Even as a child, she did not have an easy life. When Plath was eight years old, her father passed away. The same year of her father’s death, Plath wrote her first poem (“Poetry”). In the years following this trauma, she continued to develop her writing and had poems published in magazines such as Christian Science Monitor and Seventeen (Greiner 164). Sylvia Plath attended Smith College and received an internship at Mademoiselle Magazine (“Poetry”). After Plath returned from the internship, she slipped into depression and made a suicide attempt (Greiner 164). Plath met Ted Hughes while she was studying in Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship

Sylvia Plath’s depression can be recounted back to the death of her father. During the summer of her junior year at Smith College, having returned from a stay at new York City where she had been a student guest “editor” Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. Later on, after a period

In contemplating her own feelings and reasons for suicide, Sylvia Plath weighs how to emerge, and learn, from her own death wish: “How is it done? Talking and becoming aware of what is what and studying it is a help”102. In fact, Plath’s most successful poems are spoken by personas who address their survival of attempted suicide. It is her speakers that wish to die and so defiantly fail at completing their own suicides that interest me most. The speaker of the poem “Lady Lazarus” infamously claims that “Dying / is an art,” and it is Plath’s artistry of suicide which makes her poetry so successful.103 Her speakers are perfected in their inability to die—thus, Plath’s success of the failed

Sylvia Plath is often described as a feminist poet who wrote about the difficulties women faced before women's right were a mainstream idea. From reading her poetry, it is quite obvious that Plath's feminism is extremely important to her, but she also wrote about a lot of day to day experiences and made them significant through her use of literary devices such as metaphors and symbols. Plath may also be best known for her autobiographical poetry written in a confessional style that appeared during the 1950s. She is considered a very important poet of the post-World War II era. She became widely known following her suicide in 1963 (Bawer). Through Sylvia Plath's poetry, readers are able to get a glimpse into her personal life. The particular time and place in which she wrote her poetry, the death of her father, her failed marriage, her battle with depression and others who influenced her all lead to the writing of some of her most cherished works. By examining the works and events in the life of Sylvia Plath, readers are able to get a better understanding of her work and her as a woman in the era that she lived in.

Poetry is a complex form of literature that also doubles as art and expresses feelings and ideas through language. Poetry goes beyond a simple rhyme scheme that keeps us chained to a rhythm we may not even recognize. Although using poetic meter can absolutely benefit a poet by contributing to the poet’s tone and setting up a reader’s expectations for the poem, this device comes at a cost. Using a harmonic rhyme scheme can also disadvantage one’s poem because the reader can value the rhyme and rhythm over the actual words and meaning. Because of this, the modernist movement took place in poetry and other forms of art. Modernists are writers who break from traditional literary style and revolutionize poetry by incorporating current events and new language. Sylvia Plath was an American modernist poet who certainly expressed herself through her novels, confessional style poetry, and “short stories”. Plath’s most famous poems include “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Tulips”, and “Ariel”. Sylvia Plath was born in 1932, meaning she was born several years before WWII and lived through the last seven years of The Great Depression. Shortly after her eighth birthday, Plath lost her father, an entomologist and biology professor at Boston University, about a month after his foot amputation from diabetes was announced gangrene in 1940. From just her early years of seven to thirteen, she had seen so much violence in her world environment and endured so much emotional trauma. These facts have a