The pictures above, of the photogenic woman with broad shoulders and a billion-watt smile, are those of a poet among the most radical in the English language. Her critics, most of them male, define Plath as the perpetual depressive, a character known by her tragic death and “obscure poetry”. So many essays and articles of the poet are populated by words like “doomed”, “destined” and “tragic” and while Plath experienced tragedies through her life, they have disproportionately overshadowed its brilliance and darkened her literary works which beam with strength and skill. They show a story of a woman rising above her demons, not hurtling towards her own self-destruction.
Fifty-nine years after her first collection of poetry was published, Plath remains an example of how many critics see women writers, a relevant writer due to the themes in her work. In 2019, after the publication of a second volume of Plath’s letters, a rediscovered short story, the re-release of Ariel and The Bell Jar from Faber & Faber and a nod from singer Lana del Rey in her new album, the work of Sylvia Plath is speaking to us again.
Plath was born in Massachusetts, USA in 1932. Her father, Otto Plath was German American and a famous biologist, specialising in melittology, the study of bees. Her mother, Aurelia Plath (née Schober) with whom Sylvia was quite close to, was born in Boston. Sylvia wrote from a young age, having her first poem published at the age of eight in the Boston Traveller. She began writing and publishing poetry and short fiction consistently through her adolescence. Her writing would go on to earn her an internship with Mademoiselle Magazine during the summer of 1953.
Plath attended the most prestigious all-women’s university in the country, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1956, shortly after being discharged from hospital following a breakdown, Plath earned a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England. This is where many biographers prefer to let her life supercede her work. Her first year at Cambridge, Plath meets fellow poet and her future husband, Ted Hughes at the publication launch of a literary magazine. She married Hughes three months later at the age of 23. According to Plath, their relationship was intensely passionate from the beginning. Hughes encouraged her to work, often reading drafts and offering feedback on poems. This continued into their marriage. Plath wrote to friends telling of how easy domestic life seemed with Ted – who took joint responsibility for house chores and, when they birthed children in the following years, childcare and reserved the office for Plath in the mornings so she could write, he retired to the office in the evenings. In a shared interview with the BBC in 1961, Plath says of the beginning of the courtship that they “kept writing poems to each other and it just grew out of that, I guess. The feeling that we were both writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that it should keep on”. And so it did.
The impending years of marriage are famous for their turbulence, yet the work stayed Plath’s most central focus. Through domestic violence, mental health struggles and infidelity, Plath supported herself financially, emotionally and spiritually by creating works of literature.
Her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, was published in 1960 when Plath was only 28 years old. The collection features many of Plath’s most celebrated poems including ‘The Times are Tidy’ and ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ which have been staples of the Leaving Certificate English syllabus for years. In The Colossus, Plath shows her voice in its earliest rendition. Although it is exceptional as an individual collection of poetry, compared to her later works, the forms and voice of this collection seem stiff and dry. In a radio interview from 1963 with the BBC, Plath says of her first collection that her earlier poems “they in fact, quite privately, bore me!”
In January 1963, she published her only novel The Bell Jar. It is a semi-autobiographical account of the mental breakdown Plath experienced in the summer ten years previously during her internship in Mademoiselle Magazine and her subsequent hospitalisation in McLean Psychiatric Hospital. It was written by Plath as a “pot-boiler” and today occupies the ‘cult fiction’ shelves in nearly every English-language bookshop. Plath died by suicide a month after the publication of The Bell Jar; she was 30 years old. Her literary estate was controlled by Hughes who, in 1965, published Ariel, a collection of poetry Plath had finished weeks before her death. However, Hughes was disloyal to the original manuscript, disrupting the sequence of the poems and removing a select number of pieces which spoke to the abusive nature of their marriage. A restored edition of the collection was published in 2004 by Faber & Faber which honours Plath’s intended presentation of the collection. Ariel is a thematically cohesive collection of poetry, telling the story of one woman’s psychic regeneration and controlling the demons that dogged her for years. Yet the voice in Ariel is both composed and giddy, singing about female pain, sexuality and ambition. Reading the book is an absolute whirlwind, it often ricochets between feelings of pain and pleasure stunningly. The collection is being re-released this year in a new hardcover to celebrate 90 years of Faber publishing. The collection is lauded by the publishing house as the poetry book to define the 1960s.
The Collected Works of Sylvia Plath won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the most prestigious of its kind in the English language. The compilation is frightening to a first time reader, not for gory imagery or gratuitous language, but frightening in how it reintroduces the reader to the world around them. The writing, much like the writer herself, is controlled and radical, intent on dissembling society, humiliating the patriarchal governing around her and rebuilding a literary existence of her own. Critics of the poetess rarely let her work speak for her. Instead, they control the narrative, working back from the point of her death and reading her life with a sadistic, unyielding confirmation bias to make her into a mad woman, to discredit the mind and so discredit the work that is borne from it. Plath has never expressed a desire to be personally dissected via her work, she wanted readers to engage with her work and understand its relevance.
Plath understood that life’s demons and fears slither around us and while it is safer to turn away from them, she brazenly does the opposite in her work. Her poems reach out and show these demons off to the world with striking ambition and skill. Yet, like so many women throughout history, Plath became defined by some by the very things that threatened her, regardless of her multiple successes in conquering them. The irony is painful, for a woman so competent at controlling her mind and language, she is defined as deranged and unstable. As Plath said to her friend Elinor Friedman Klein “When I was crazy, all I was, was crazy. Anyone who thinks I was walking around writing poetry then doesn’t know what they are talking about ”. The work of Plath is the work of a victor; it symbolised her success from struggles, not the struggles themselves.
