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Famous Poet: Sylvia Plath

© Ashley T. Drye

Sylvia Plath published her first poem when she was eight years old. Plath on the outside was known as a model daughter, popular in school, had straight A's, and won all the best prizes. Under the surface, there was said to be "grave personal discontinuities" which originated after the death of her father. The first time Sylvia Plath tried to kill herself, was during her junior year of college. She swallowed sleeping pills, but did not succeed. She describes this instance in her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.

In 1956, Plath married the poet, Ted Hughes. In 1960, when she was 28, her first book, The Colossus, was published in England. After only 5 years of marriage and less than 2 years after the birth of their first child, her marriage broke apart. Plath now found herself living in an English flat with two children, sick with the flu, and low on money. This is really when she wrote most of her best poems. She would write poems between 4am - 8am before her children would wake, sometimes even finishing a poem a day. In these last poems it becomes more evident how depressed she is and how much she wishes for death.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30.

Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes.



Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call